Crystal Whisky Glass – A Digital Rendering

I continue to be both fascinated and inspired by the various genres and styles of quality digital art being created these days. I have also learned a deep respect for the artists who develop and use new media, and recognise the experience, passion and dedication involved.

I enjoyed painting several whisky glasses some years ago, and therefore decided to model a whisky glass for the practice, with facets and all. This naturally lead to creating ice cubes etc. to make up a complete scene, with the intention of achieving a certain level of realism. Modeling and texturing was done in Blender 2.63 using my own image textures, and rendered with Cycles GPU rendering.

 

 

 

 

 

Whisky Glass Oil Painting

An oldie I found when going through archives. An oil painting on canvas which portrays a crystal whisky glass, with Jameson on ice, from 2006/7. This is one of the last of a series of glass studies from around the time when I was exploring the characteristics of glass and other liquid, in preparation for future work. It was during this time that I also attended workshops in glass torchwork, and fusing and slumping, giving me a better ’feel’ for a material that has always greatly fascinated me. I clearly remember thoroughly enjoying painting this particular work. The painting belongs to a private collector in the United Kingdom.

Whisky glass, oil on canvas, 31½ x 27½ x 1 in. (80 x 70 x 2.5 cm).

My virtual hand

 

The direction that my paintings have taken, naturally aroused my curiosity in new media and inevitably led me to begin exploring the world of Digital Content Creation.

I had squeezed every last drop out of my old system, so a few months ago, I built myself a new-generation Quad Core system with plenty of RAM, decent graphics capability and sufficient room for future expansion, should the need arise.

 

I am particularly fascinated by organic mesh modeling and have been using myself, my family, and my good old anatomy books as reference to practice modeling in 3D. After some good practice, it starts to become rather intuitive, and then the addiction sets in…

The following example shows a few stages in modeling process. The result, a polygonal model of my own hand, using only quads to form the hand topology, shown here with two levels of subdivision. The completed base model will later be textured with colour and normal maps to add more detail, then rigged and skinned for posing and animation. All modeling was done in Blender, using a pen tablet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Transient worlds

Soap bubbles are a lovely combination of transparency, reflection and refraction. Thin-film interference creates a beautiful iridescence on the three-dimensional form, leading to an incredible fusion of colour and light. Transient little worlds, briefly capturing a passing moment, always a visual splendor and an imaginative feast full of many little surprises…