Coffee Study: Iced Coffee

Our first study was into a popular and refreshing beverage, the Iced Coffee. Some of the key Characteristics that I wanted to focus on is the "chill" of the drink, as well as the look of the coffee as you add the cream.

Iced Coffee Shot 01:

With this one, its nothing crazy but it is just upgrading the inspiration image in almost every way. Composition: Having a large pool of photogrammetry, the idea was to fill the frame with much more objects, but with the inspiration image as reference, we didn't want to deviate too much. A simple camera change to get a shallower angle and moving the background objects closer seems to do the trick. Glass Condensation: It's a very common trend in Drink CG to have glass condensation so I'm not preaching this as new tech, BUT we did use some new tech to make this.

Firstly, we start with a particle sim. I wont go into detail but I scatter a ton of points on the glass and as these select points move down, they're influenced left and right to give that unpredictable movement we now from watching rain on your window. We want to keep these previous positions so we can have a trail.

After freezing the frame on the end to hold the entire trail, we use some code to capture the UV on the glass and moving our trail to the matching UV position. From here we can convert it to a volume and make it a 2D Volume as if it's a texture (in Houdini we have a volume slice node).

Finally! We are able to use Houdini's new COP system allows us to generate and manipulate 3D volumes and Geometry as if they are textures in the 3D space. The beauty in this is we can use the volume trails and use it as a map in combination with another Noise pattern to give us a really nice texture map that we can export and use in our Shader.

Why is this cool? Previously, do to something like wet maps or any geometry noise, we are limited to the resolution of the geometry. Something like a glass isn't going to be super high resolution so we have a geometry map of about 1k. This method shown though, we now can convert this volume map into a texture map of their own! (Most texture maps are normally 4k or higher).

Compositing: Lastly, we have a set collection of tools for our photorealistic images, like chromatic aberration, lens distortion, etc.

And just like that, we have our first upgrade done! We will continue to improve on our tech and introduce proper animation into our next study but I think this is the direction to continue for the next studies. Stay tuned for more!