Blender 3D: Cosmetic Product Modeling, Lighting and Rendering

1. Trailer: Creating a cosmetic product is not that easy. You have to make sure that the model fits, the materials fit, but also the lighting, which is the hardest to do. This is why I have created this course. The course will start by modeling the bottle itself and giving you tips on how to achieve the best shape possible. From there, we will progress into making the liquid. After that, we will create materials. I'll guide you through the process, creating different materials, the metal, but also materials for the other elements. Then comes the fun part. Lighting. I'll teach you how to professionally light a product like this. Then we import our sticker and get into rendering our product. 2. 00 Intro: Hello. In this course, I'm going to teach you how to create this cosmetic serum bottle. I had initially done this project as a personal project to learn how to light cosmetic products. I have decided to create a course for it. This is the initial result, and this is the result that we are going to achieve. By the end of this course, you will learn a variety of things. Mainly, how to create the cosmetic bottle itself. How to achieve this particular shape. How to a square, go into a circle and make these rings have the same ***gth. But also how to create some materials for this particular product as well as the liquid. We are going to explore how to make the liquid and also the sticker. We are not going to explore how to make the sticker, but how to import your own sticker. I'll provide you with the sticker in particular. You can use it as you wish. Yeah, stay tuned. I hope you watch to the end and submit your own result as a project. 3. 01 Modeling The Serum Bottle : The first thing I want to do is import a reference photo. I have already worked on this project before. To make the process easier, I'm just going to use the render that I produced there to get the bottle to have the same dimensions, because I believe that I got the dimensions right before. Before you import your reference photo, you want to be in the front view so that your reference photo is facing the front view. Now shift a, add a reference and browse to the image like so. Once you have the reference photo, it's type to create a cube. Shift A, let's create a cube. Let's go to the wireframe view. Let's create another window here. Let's go to solid view. Let's move this face upwards. Now we want to bevel this cube to get the smooth edges. But before we bevel it, we need to apply everything using control A. Apply all. If you don't have that menu, you can enable the Pi menu from your add on tab. It comes pre installed with b***der, so you don't have to worry about installing it yourself. Now that everything is applied, we can bevel maybe five times. That looks good. Actually, let's add one segment. We want 123456 edges. There looks good enough for now. Now let's add some loop tools around the cube. Let's go to edit mode control. Let's add 7234567. Let's count 1234567. Let's do the same for the other side. Now. Once we have done that, we can hide the reference photo. Go to the front view, go to edit mode again, Let's select the middle edge. And with the view that has the wireframe mode enabled, let's press and middle mouse button to deselect the bottom one. Now we need to move this upwards to get curve here. For that, we want to enable proportional editing, and I'm going to use inverse square, but as you can see the cube is a bit too high, so I'm going to go to vertex mode. Let's drop these around there. Now let's do this again. The select these with C and middle mouse button. Now let's move this like so. Looks good. Let's disable the reference again. Let's go to the top view. Select the middle vertex. We want to expand the selection with control plus, so that's good enough. Let's delete these vertices. Let's the square of vertices here. We want this to become a circle. For that, you need to use loop tools. It's easily accessible if you enable it in the add on tab loops. It comes with B***der, I believe. Let's select circle. Let's disable proportional editing, So let's go back to the front view. Let's extrude this circle. Once you are in this stage, you must be prepared to use something called repeat history. You can repeat whatever action needed before. To get these to be the same ***gth. We are going to do the first step and then plastic and then repeat the other step to get the same ***gth. And then the plastic and then the same thing again. Let's extrude scale. I'm not sure where I'm extruding. Okay, so let's extrude up. Extrude scale, and then extrude up again. We are actually, let's go back one step and extrude a bit higher. Once we are here, let's use the repeat history. I messed it up because I rewind it. One step, we're going to have to do that again. Extrude scale. Extrude upwards. Now we need to extrude scale and maybe move region beat history, beat history, just like So since we don't have plastic part here, it's a bit higher than it should be. We can manually scale this one. This is where we stop for the bottle modeling. I believe if you're not aware, you can bring up the menu using three on your keyboard. I believe I have it on my Space bar, but I believe the default is three. The next thing that we are going to do is perhaps bevel some of the edges here. Let's turn off the reference photo. I want to bevel these edges. Let's hold shift and select this ring here as well as the others. I'm actually not going to level that one and now control and bevel it like, so let's shade it smooth. Let's add a subdivision modifier for these since we have a, how do I say smooth edges where we shouldn't? For example, this edge here should be a little bit harsh or sharper. We are going to use edge crease for this. The shortcut is shift E. You can sharpen edges when you use subdivision modifier without creating new geometry. I believe multiple edges need to be sharpened. Let's disable this subdivision modifier to better see our edges. Make sure you go all around. Let's sharpen that one. I believe that's all. Let's enable the subdivision modifier, shift E and sharpen. The good thing is that you can go back at any moment that you like and edit this. It doesn't mess with your geometry, it's non destructive. I believe this is a good time to add the tip of the cosmetic product. The way I would approach that is by creating a UV sphere and perhaps deleting the bottom of it. Let's delete these vertices and grab the bottom ones and extrude down about there is enough. Let's shade it smooth and we make sure that it's fitting inside. Can also go to the view. Actually we can't see anything in the To view. I'm going to add the solidified modifier to the bottle. Maybe 0.70 0.07 will do. 4. 02 Modeling The Liquid: Now the liquid, we are not at the rendering stage yet. We might have to redo that or make changes to it, but I believe that we cannot go forward without creating liquid. How exactly do you do that? We have thickness inside. I'm going to duplicate this original. Let's name this bottle. Let's name this liquid. Let's disable the subdivision modifier. Let's apply the solidified modifier. Now let's go to the edit mode. Let's delete these faces here. We can see that there are faces underneath. Let's go back to added mode. Let's delete the pace. Maybe even expand the selection. You don't want to keep doing that, because then you might reach the liquid and the, Let do it gradually. Let's select. Okay, that didn't work. Actually, we don't need the top. So let's just delete it. We want a edge loop. We want to scale it along the z axis and type zero, and then constrain it to the z axis with the letter Z and then type zero. Then we can delete whatever vertices are above it. Now we go, I believe the liquid and close it, but that's not a clean way to close it. Grid, Phil. Maybe grid, Phil, is not working. So maybe symmetries, symmetries is not working. That let's do origin to geometry now let's try symmetries again. And symmetries works wire frame. And let's move this higher. When you have liquid in cup or something, the edges are usually sticking up higher than the actual surface. We want to simulate that by intentionally making the edges stick up higher. Just a little bit. Not too much, a little. You might see it in renders. Actually, let's select all these edges scale by the z axes, type zero. That looks good and it's clean. Okay, that's it for the water. We're going to enable the bottle. Let's make sure that the liquid is properly scaled and fitting snugly inside a bottle. Let's go to Edit mode wireframe. I hope this part is not too confusing for you, Let's move it about there. It's fitting very snugly inside. Let's apply everything. Let's the origin to geometry. Let's scale it just a little so that it doesn't take outside. Let's verify the corners preferably. We don't want it to stick outside because liquid in real life doesn't cycles is a physically based rendering engine. It will look weird. That's it. For the liquid. We might have to retouch it down the line because we are not quite rendering. We don't know how it looks yet, but so far it's 5. 03 Materials: Now let's work on the glass material. We will have multiple materials, but we are going to start with the glass material and it's going to be applied to both the bottle and the liquid as well. Select the bot, go to object, create a new material, let's call it glass. Once you have that created, we are going to create a few nodes here. I'm going to make this bigger so that you can see. Let's create a glass SDF control shift click to connect it. If you have the node Angular add on, it comes pre installed with b***der. Now let's create a color ramp. Let's connect that to the color for the roughness. I want to give it some roughness. There is no object on earth that has zero roughness. I believe it doesn't exist for the war. I'm going to maybe 310 the notes that come after they were copied from different sources. They may not always make sense, but if you copy them exactly, you will get a good result. Let's create a mat node. Let's, let's, let's change it to maximum or minimum. Actually, let's change the value to. Let's create another. This node is going to be the ad, let's create, it's the same node except it's set to subtract. Let's give this one geometry back facing. Let's change the value here to one. Now we need to create three Matt nodes. Let's connect that. Let's change it to our. Let's connect it to the top. We need a light pad and the camera to the bottom. Now let's connect ray ***gth and value to this. Let's change the power to two. Let's change it to multiply. I'm going to change the node where I connected it to the top. Let's type maybe minus 0700. I think we are done with the glass material. I'm going to preview how it looks like. I'm going to also apply to liquid. If I discover that I need to change something, we will go back to it. But so far it looks good to me. Let's add some here, maybe change this. You can see that we get a different look as we play with this node here. It will all make sense once we have the important lighting setup. Because right now we are only using an HDRI. That's not what we are going to use for the final product. Since we got the glass material done, we are going to work on the other materials, such as metal parts like these rings. The plastic that falls in the middle of them. But before we do that, let's try to set up some better lighting. It will not be fine all, but it will help see what our cosmetic products looks like. Let's set the rotation to the treaty cursor. Let's bring down the size. But you can't quite do that without affecting the overall look. Not bad. We can work with this and then improve on it once we are done with the materials. Once we got that, let's go ahead and create a new material here. Let's name it metal. We are going to assign it to the rings. Let's disable the subdivision modifier and the smoothing. Let's apply that material. Selected a sign, now we need to apply it to this bottom ring. Let's select an edge. I'm not sure how I would select that, actually. Let's go to face select mode. Okay, how you would disselects by pressing Shift old and click a face. Now let's assign that material to it. Let's go to the rendered preview. Let's make sure to enable subdivision and she now let's also enable auto smooth. Why not? Let's go back to object mode and change the color to this code here. I hope you can see it. That's the code there. And drop the metallic all the way down. The roughness all the way down, This one makes no difference. Actually, we might have to increase the metallic all the way up. It looks strange because the lighting is not yet set up. We will leave it at that. For the plastic, it will be a simple material. Let's create a new material, let's call it plastic and go to edit mode. Let's disable subdivision modifier. Let's select all these faces here and assign the newly created material to them. That's all it is. Could play with the roughness, maybe increase it for the rubber tip. It will be a simple material as well since you cannot see all the details from this view or what we are going to render. At least it's no need to make it too complicated. Maybe other than using this code here for the rubber tip. That would be good for now. We might adjust these colors and values once we have the lighting set up. This lighting is not final. We don't quite know how things really look like. We are missing one object here. It's the actual piece that goes deep into the liquid on the bottle. How it would create that is simply by perhaps selecting these edges here, shift to duplicate them. Let's change the pivot point to active element, active median point. Let's go to the front view and extrude, just like so, and try to make a ball. And then the last one, you extrude and scale and then type zero. Then you might have to merge by distance and 31 vertices were removed. For this piece in particular, we might have to apply the same glass material. What I'm going to do is select any edge control L to select Linked, then choose the glass here and it to assign it to that it's looking good. Let's see how it looks like. I'm not happy with how it looks like. I'm going to make this material single currently, it's used by three objects. Make it. Let's delete all of these and make a very simple glass materials. Sdf, BS, DF and shader control. Shift, click and mix these two. And maybe play with the, with the slider here. Okay, Now that it looks good enough, we are going to leave it at that. We're going to come back to it if we have to, after we set up the lighting. 6. 04 Lighting: We are getting quite advanced into discourse. I believe this is a good time to start working on the lighting. We are going to use light panels and there will not be your average light panel. If we change this to maybe image editor, let's open an image. If you pay attention on these reflections, they are quite smooth, you have a harsh reflection there, but as it progresses, it becomes quite smooth. How exactly do you do that? Well, you cannot do it with the regular lights that are implemented in b***der. You need something akin to a gradient. That's what we are going to create. First of all, let's clean up the lights here. Let's move this to another collection. Call it reference the way you would move something to another collection is selected and press M on your keyboard and then you can select what you want to do. Create a new collection or select a pre existing one. Maybe let's change these as well. Let's move them. Borrow the Sun. It's created by default on my start up file, so don't worry about that. Now, let's start adding the lights. I'm going to create a new collection, call it lighting. Maybe open up a new view here and go to the tread viewport. Let's create a plane. Let's show overlays to see the plane. Let's change the pivot point to three cursor so that we can rotate it from the perspective of the cursor. We got a plane here, we can start shading it. Let's create a new material. Let's call it light panel. Let's give it a name, maybe number. Actually, we might need to create another one to keep it organized. Let's name it one for the light panel, you need to create an emission mission. And then color ramp. If you don't know how to bring up that menu, it's Shift A Search or Shift. If you click, as soon as the menu comes up, it will select and you can start. Let's gradient grading in here. I believe it belongs there. No, then we need the mapping node. If you have no regular add on, you can control on this node here and it will add the mapping for you for the emission strength. Let's use maybe 500 for now for the first color of the color ramp. Let's use this code If you can see it clearly, here's the code, the gradient. Let's change it maybe to easing for the texture coordinate. We want the object to be plugged into the vector. Now you can see that we have a gradient here. We can start playing with it to light up the scene with the playing done, I want to make this gradient a bit smoother because to Smooth effect. It needs to be smooth. It shouldn't be so harsh. The way you would achieve that is by changing some values, 0.0 4.0 0.0 40. Then let's apply the scale. Try not to apply the scale too much because it will keep interfering with the look of your gradient. Right now, it looks perfect to me. I need to make this plane a little bit wider. How you would do that is scaling with and then pressing X twice. If you press X once, you can use the global orientation, But if you press it again, it will use the planes orientation just like that. I want it a bit higher as well. You can use the squares I got here to copy my set up. These are the big lines. And you want this corner to align with this corner here, and then stretch it towards the other corner as well. Now we need another plane and we can simply create an instance of this one using old. Let's change the pivot point to three de cursor and make this one like there so it's starting to look good. If you don't want the planes to interfere with your render, you can simply select any plane, go to this icon here and go down to visibility. And disable the camera. It will work the same except for its visibility to the camera. I'm going to leave it enabled for now. I'm going to create another plane. Let's rotate it according to its own origin. Let's scale it a little bit. I want to move this here, This one I want to be taller or longer, just like. So we are starting to get a pretty good look here. Make sure that your subdivision modifier is enabled. There are a few fixes that we need to do. For example, here you can see that we got something weird, that's because we need to add edge crease is there. Let's disable the subdivision modifier, and let's select these edges. Let's look for edge crease. Remember this menu is brought up with three on your keyboard. What does edge crease do here is making the corner tighter and that will fix the shading issues that we have. Before applying it this way you can avoid adding edge loops to your model. It's starting to look good. I'm using the filmic color profile b***der comes with filmic recently, but I'm using the one that I got from Github. I'll leave a link to it if you want to install it. I also like to use a higher contrast. We also need to make the liquid a bit higher. Let's go to Y frame mode and make sure that you select the top vertices and bring it higher. One other thing you want to check is if normals are pointing inwards or outwards and that can affect the shading and how it looks inside a bottle. Let's enable face orientation and go to solid mode and make sure that it's looking red. Inside it looks red. I don't think I want this bit here to look red. I'm going to shift and to recalculate the normals it's now pointing out. You can also experiment with the water if you want to see how it looks when it's pointing outward. But you can see it disappeared completely. Let's change it back to what it was. You can see that it appears again. 7. 05 Sticker: Now is a perfect time to add our sticker. Adding a sticker is quite simple. All you need is an add on called image. Import image as planes, you go to image, shift A go to image, or images as planes. I'm going to find my sticker here. I'll provide this. You can use it or you can create your own using Adobe Illustrator or any software that you like to use with that imported. Let's rotate 90 degrees. Let's bring it to brand. Let's scale it just like maybe make the water or liquid a bit higher and that's how you get your sticker. Maybe you can move it closer to the bottle. Perfect. 8. 06 Rendering: I'm also going to quickly fix this arc here that I think it's too much. The way you would do that is by going to the front view. Hitting forward slash to isolate the bottle. Just go to edit mode. Now if we want to bring this down without interfering with the above geometry, we need to hide this. Let's select a edge loop here, control L. Actually, that's not how you do it. Select the vertex and then select the next one. While holding shift old, that's not going to work. Let's try edges. Okay. Shift old while clicking the next edge. Then control, keep pressing control until you have this last ring selected. Now I want to press H on my keyboard to hide it. Let's actually hide the vertices. That worked beautifully. Let's disable these modifiers just for a second. Now we can select these vertices here. Let's go to the Y frame mode to bring up the selection circle and with your middle mouse button, select these. As we did before, I'm going to enable the proportional editing inverse square and move the while constraining to the Xs just like so the above geometry, it was not affected. We have this pretty glow effect happening there. I would say that's a lot better. Once the lighting and the overall geometry is satisfactory enough, we can move to rendering this product. You can do a few touches. For example, the liquid is a bit too close to the bottle. You might want to just scale it a little bit just to see or get this separation happening on the side. It looks pretty like that. Now let's create a camera. Why not? Let's move the sticker to the bottle and create a new collection. Call it, we are only going to use one camera. Let's create a camera here with the camera selected, control Alt, and press zero on your non pad, that the camera assumes the current position of the viewpoint camera. You want to change the camera settings to orthographic. We are going to use a square rendering resolution, so you can change it. Ear, if you want square, just simply input the same resolution for the y and x axis. Now you can play with the camera. Let's maybe center this. Do this again. The control zero on your non pad. We have a few objects here. It's probably a good time to create an empty just like, let's move it to the bottom of the bottle, just where it barely disappears. Let's move it to the bottle now. Let's select everything in this collection. And select the empty last, so that it is active. The active appears in brighter, orange color. And then press control and object, keep transform. Now let's rename the empty something like that. Wherever we move the empty, everything else will move with it. We will not interfere with that. We will simply use the camera. If you want to move the camera closer, you can go to the top view. Where is the camera? I'm not sure why I don't see it in this view. Maybe it's isolated. Yeah, it's isolated mode, forward slash to get out of that, if you want to move it closer, press and then twice effect, it's not moving. Interesting. We could use the orthographic scale to get it. It works the same. I didn't know that moving the camera does not work on the orthographic view. That's how we do it. You could perhaps increase the lighting a little bit. I believe that's high enough. Now we are basically ready to render. All you have to do now is go to the menu and render or press F 12. But before you do that, make sure that any object that you have hidden is selected from rendering. I have this add on that does that for you, synchronize. Render ports could simply click that and it will synchronize what's getting rendered and what's not. Yeah, let's press Render and wait for it to finish. The rendering is done and that's the result of everything we have done. You could also play with the color of the glass material. If you clicked on the bottle, any selected glass material, you'll see that we have already created a color wrap and set up this gradient interior. If you change the first color to something like blue, you get an interesting result. Don't make it too extreme because it will look strange. But if you make slight adjustments, you'll get interesting results. I like this one personally. Yeah, find your color and perhaps stick with it.