1. The scene
The scene is very simple to setup. A floor plane to place the ice on, the ice mesh and one plane Vray light source in the top left corner to give the ice a nice highlight. Add a camera and there you go.

2. The ice mesh
The ice mesh was built as a very rough low polygon shape. Once you have the rough shape add the turbo smooth modifier in four iterations. If you are a dedicated quad modeler like me, this will give you a very dense, smooth and boring mesh. So next you add a noise modifier to mess the shape up. Play with the values but depending on the mesh you would need to use the fractal option as well as tweaking the scale value.

Once you are happy and the noise hasn’t completely destroyed the shape you then add the optimize modifier. This will peel away polygons depending on an angle threshold. Again, experiment with the values. You can see the result on my speech bubble in the image below. Hopefully, you got lot’s of detail by the edges and less detail in the flat areas. With this, you would then again add a turbo smooth modifier with one iteration to get rid of the super sharp polygon edges.

Next step is to add the UV coordinates. For this pretty much flat bubble shape I didn’t bother to unwrap it but instead just used a planar projection. Lastly, I put on a smooth modifier to assign all polygons to the same smoothing group.

3. Maps
I created the texture maps half from photo references and half by hand painting in Photoshop. What you want is a nice, frosty image as a basis which you turn black and white. To have the ice be clearer towards the edges you just spray black. I then needed to clone and create a lot of new cracks. Since the middle part of the ice will appear to be solid snow this area needs to be almost full black, but keep a version with the details in for the bump map. When you are done you simply invert it either in Max or Photoshop. This will be your reflect, glossiness and refraction map. The bump map is the same image without inversion and not burned out for the transparency to work. We need those details.

4. The shader
Go to the material editor and create a new Vray material (VrayMtl). For diffuse, just put a nice, ice white color. In reflection, turn on Fresnel and then stick your inverted
ice crack map in the reflect and glossiness slots and also in the refract slot. The bump map goes in the bump map slot obviously. I experimented with using the bump map for displacement but the render times went sky high, which is also why I opted to go for the modeling technique described above.

In the refract section, make sure to check the affect shadows option. Otherwise you’ll get a solid shadow even where there shouldn’t be one.

4. Render settings
I switched GI on in the render settings, using the Irradiance map and Light cache engines. You can set them pretty low quality as this is more to lighten up the non-lit sides. For global illumination and environment reflection I’m using a HDR image of a beach. Doesn’t really matter what image you use as long as it has a bit of horizon. You could probably get away with a gradient even.

5. In conclusion
When it comes to renders like this with lots of transparency and whites, you are going to spend a lot of time tweaking. It’s a very fine line between too burnt out whites and gray looking snow. On top of that, what makes a render like this work is what you put behind it and around it. Then environment map for instance has a lot of influence on the overall colors.

Clean render:

Cinema effect: (tutorial link)

Lomo effect: (tutorial link)

This one uses a heavily modified version of the theme ePhoto by Elegant Themes. It has built in jQuery slider functionality and works very well in all browsers.

You can visit the live website here: http://www.lemonade.sg

The rig is very simple. Basically it’s the four wheels plus the car body. This is usually enough to make convincing animation using only a bit of fractal noise rotation keys to similate the movement over the car chassis.

Car physics is always a bit of a hassle to get looking right and I’ve tried a lot of different approaches. This one is using an amazing plug in created by Andrey Kozlov (Karba). It’s called MadCar and the coolest feature by far is that you can either key frame animate or record your driving using either keyboard, mouse or a gamepad! This makes for a lot more interesting animations since you are actually driving the car instead of hand-keying.

This is rendered using Vray and its toon outline shader.

Ship front view. Even though it’s using toon shaders, the main shader has falloff reflections.

Without textures yet. Just simple, flat shaders.

The ground plane is using a procedural displacement shader using several layers of fractal noise.

The cost of using photography for these bottle shots are quite immense, so Publicis looked for a way to streamline the process, especially for the web where one can get away with lower resolution. That’s when they commissioned me to create, texture, shade and light these models.

As always when dealing with liquid inside glasses, one must be careful the outside polygons of the liquid is inside the polygons of the glass. This is because it’s practically impossible to model the two shapes (liquid and glass) close but not touching each other without getting render defects. Using the overlapping technique, Vray will calculate the index of refraction correctly and without seams.