I had a lot of trouble when thinking of an item for this treasure scene. I thought of things like maybe a sword, a goblet, or a bracelet. That was until I played dnd and watched Shrek. When creating the loot for a raid, I realized potions seemed to be quite common, and then when I saw the second Shrek movie, I loved the way the potion looked and decided to do it as well.
When thinking of the potion concept, I decided to make a sleeping potion instead since I wanted to try to make a galaxy inside of a bottle. However, I understood that I may have to scrap that idea due to the complexity of the idea.
Yet, I still liked the idea of a dark purple/blue potion idea So I wanted to go for it.
To start off, I used a cylinder polygon and removed the faces off each end.
After that, I kept extruding the edges upwards creating the outer shape of the bottle. Once I got to the opening of the bottle, I went into the wireframe view and started extruding back down, creating the inside of the bottle. When I got to the bottom, I used the "merge to center" tool.
Then, I made another cylinder, made one side a bit larger, creating a cork shape, and moving it to the entrance of the bottle.
Secondly, I selected the faces at the bottom of the bottle and extruded them outwards. Afterward, I deleted the faces connecting the extruded faces to the bottle. Once the new faces and the bottle are disconnected, I used the "separate" tool so that I could work on the decorations without affecting the main bottle. After that, I extruded the faces and slowly moved them around the bottle.
After making the main decoration. I used the same process at the top of the bottle.
Extruding faces, separate them, and then modeling it around the neck of the bottle
To make the liquid inside of the bottle, I selected the inside of the bottle, extruded them inwards, and separated them. However, the shape was completely black, I had some trouble figuring out how to fix it until I realized it could be due to the shape being inverted. Once I found the invert mesh tool, light could finally hit the mesh.
I realized that the bottom of the inside of the bottle seemed to be missing its mesh and I realized it must have been deleted when I created the shape of the liquid. So I had to rebuild it which took a long time and made me feel like I was wasting time.
Once I had fixed the bottle. I finally did the UV unwrapping. This took way too long which I believe is due to the details I had added. I also had a lot of trouble with the inside of the bottle so I decided to separate them instead.
When I started texturing the bottle, I watched a video to see how they did it which you can see here.
That's when I saw I could just use presets which made the process much quicker and led me to texture the main body and decorations of the bottle using these presets instead since I had problems with metallic shaders in substance painter. But these seemed correct.
The only thing I didn't texture this way was the cork since I wanted to add a different kind of texturing.
When I exported the FBX and imported it into substance painter, I saw that the UV was on the wrong tile and that I could therefore not paint the UVs. This was an easy fix however since I just had to move the UVs up and exporting it again.
One Id fixed it, I started texturing the cork. I started by adding a smart material first and then a material that had a wood texture on it. The smart material made the cork much more matte while the wood texture made the colour darker and the pattern looks right for a cork.
Finally, I added a sphere mesh light and put it inside the potion to give it a similar glowing effect to the potion in Shrek 2 and give it a mystical feel. However, the reason the potion is a darker colour is that I wanted it to look like a sleeping potion. So when I made the light's intensity and exposure too high, it looked weird.
Final Turnaround
I wanted to make the platform smoother however I did not have enough time for it to happen.
Moodboard for Environment:
The first line of images has the colours that I want to have in the scene. So I like the orange glow that happens around the golden hour. I also like the sun streams in the second line of images.
Before I did anything, I made a cauldron and some bookshelves in the background to give the area a more witchy feel than just an empty room. I then added a skydome and attached an HDR to it. However, the images kept rendering with a lot of noise. So while searching around I found out it's because I have to increase the sample number.
I also lowered the intensity and exposure so that the skydome light didn't look too strong. After that, I added a spotlight and volume to create the sunbeams. As I looked at the lights in the room I started to think that it may look more natural if I switched the sunbeams to the other side and lower the volume of the skydome to get rid of the foggy light.
After doing that, I added a metal texture to the cauldron and put a green sphere mesh light inside of the cauldron to make the atmosphere much more witchy.
I still had problems with noise though which didn't change even when I increased the samples. That when I was told my lecturer, Anandh Ramesh, gave me some advice on lighting, that portal light would work better than area lights.
Although that helps, the lighting at the table was much darker than what I wanted. Then Anandh Ramesh said I should put an area light behind the camera to fix that issue.
After the workshop, I started to unwrap the UV of the chair, tablecloth and bookshelves. To then texture the rest of the scene. Although the bookshelf and the tablecloth were easy to unwrap, I spent a lot of time unwrapping the chair UV, and I decided to not include the gold detail on the chair. So I gave it a preset instead. Not only that, I got a moon phase image from a copyright-free website so that it wasn't left blank.
When I finally added the potion into the scene, I decided to move the items around on the table to make it look less cluttered and put more focus on the bottle but making sure nothing in front of it. That's, when I felt like the candlelight, seemed weird with clear glass, so I ended up giving it a frosted glass look instead.
I started off with green tiles in the back to keep with the witchy feeling however, that's when I realised it ruined the golden hour look. However, I still liked the green tiles so I sent an image of it with red tiles and one with green tiles.
After getting some peer feedback, everyone agreed that red tiles looked much better and had a better atmosphere. so here is the final render of the scene! It was a great experience and has really made me interested in 3D work and background work
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