Soçuis Sparkling Wine is a fictitious product I chose for my Packaging Design project. The goal was to design the labeling of the bottle through any 3D method (I chose Autodesk Maya) and have the wine in a glass. Given the fact that I had about a week to come up with an idea and execute it, I’m particularly happy with the result. Given more time though, I’m sure I could have added extra elements that would really make this bottle design stand out more!
The Sketch
One of the goals of the assignment was to create an original company with a logo. I originally called it “Soçois” so it sounded similar to how the French name “François” would. I figured the “u” gave it a more character later on as I was retracing it in Illustrator.
Vectorized Logo
I intended for the letter “S” to have a freehand look while the rest of the characters were more solid. This was because I wanted a good balance between a “fancy, flourished” look and simplicity, like many wine labels incorporate. I changed and refined some of the curves on the “S” and used the typeface “Antique Olive” for the rest of the lettering. The words “Sparkling Wine” are written in Peignot LT Light.
Modeling in Maya
The great thing about my specific product is that both a wine bottle and a wine glass are typically symmetrical. All I essentially did was draw the curves on Illustrator, save it without compression, then drag the file into my scene. This will import the curves I drew as a CV curve that I could simply “revolve” to create my object.
The bottle was obviously the bigger challenge since very little really had to be done to the wine glass other than giving it a special transparent shader (I used the MIA material). With the bottle, I had to map the UV’s for the cork and the rest of the body. I then took a UV Snapshot of the texture map and imported it to Photoshop, where I can design the label, color, and texture of the cork.
Textures, Lighting, and Rendering
Aside from the basic texture map seen below, I also had to create maps for the transparent parts of the bottle, the elevation of the label from the body of the bottle using bump mapping, and a map for removing the specular highlights from the cork and the label. These maps were applied to a Phong material that works well with opaque or semi-transparent shiny objects that utilize transparency.
The wine glass was not designed with the liquid inside. It was only given a mental ray shader called MIA with a “thin glass” preset. The sparkling wine liquid was later added in Photoshop using masking and blending modes.
Aside from the HDRI that add reflections and overall light to the scene, directional lights were also used to highlight specific areas of the scene, and a spotlight was used to light up the wine bottle. After I was happy with the lighting of the scene, I rendered it at an HD 1080 resolution using Mental Ray settings, bumping up refractions as well as increasing the accuracy of indirect lighting to 500.
Photoshop Finalization
I took the high quality render into Photoshop for the finishing touches. I darkened the background and the back of the table for a more dramatic contrast in lighting. The sparkling wine liquid was also added into the wine at this point using blending modes to maintain texture and reflections. Lastly, I added the logo and a catchy slogan to the top right to utilize the space more effectively and really make the product stand out.
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