Passion Project
– Rabbit Hole distillery
Rabbit Hole is a distillery located in the heart of downtown Louisville, Kentucky. Being a Kentucky native and bourbon connoisseur, I decided to model one of their bottles. While this isn’t bourbon it is a refresh of their current (2019) Liddel Vodka. This bottle features a new color combination for the labels and revised gold foil details.
The why:
For this project I set a goal for myself to create a photo-realistic rendering. I wanted to push myself and learn better modeling techniques, texturing, and lighting/scene setup.
– the design journey
research & Modeling
The first thing I learned when starting this project was making sure I had enough reference material. The more you have the better and more accurate of achieving photo-realism. For me I had a physical bottle that I could work from and reference.
After taking measurements I jumped into Blender and started modeling the silhouette. While working through this I learned the basics of primitive modeling. Once I was happy with the silhouette, I modeled the cap and moved onto texturing.
shading & texturing
Texturing is easily my favorite part of the 3D design process. It’s the part that brings everything to life, but it is also the most time consuming and frustrating to learn. I jumped into it head first learning and experimenting along the way. After some time though I created image masks and textures that eventually became the labels and text. As for the glass and water droplets, I created a procedural node setup that gave me the control I needed.
Lighting
Finally it was time for lighting and rendering. Blender made it easy with its live viewport to sculpt the light on the model. While I think the lighting setup can be further tweaked in the final images, I was happy with the results and achieved the goal I set out to accomplish.
