Brycetech: Making Bottles in Bryce Part 1

Download the PDF of this tutorial.

Here you will learn some basic considerations when creating your own bottles.  You will see how the bottles were made in the "New Drink" image which should give the basics for making images with your own Bryce modeled bottles.  Keep in mind that any object that has reflection, refraction, and transparency will take a while to render.  The more complex and the larger the quantity of them, the longer it will take.

Create a Basic Bottle

First Create a cylinder.
Be sure to set all of the attributes for these objects to Positive.  This will be necessary to perform the boolean operations that will later be done.
Create a cone and place it slightly above your cylinder.
Create another cylinder for the neck of the bottle.  Then to make a rounded transition between the bottles body and the neck, add a torus and position it accordingly.

Group these objects and make this group Negative.  This is the basis of the bottle.   Be sure to name it something meaningful.  I called it insidebottle1.  The reason for this name will be obvious as you progress in the tutorial.

Give your bottle a glass texture.

 

Creating the Whole Bottle

Think about the construction of a bottle for a moment.  There is both an interior and an exterior to a bottle right?  The basic bottle form that was just made is what the bottle will look like on the inside regardless of what decorations are added to the outside.  In a bottle that is transparent or semitransparent, it is quite necessary to make both layers apparent.
Duplicate your bottle group and make the duplicate larger in the X and Z planes.  Make this group positive.

 

I added a torus at the top of the neck cylinder to give a rounded transition at that location.
Be sure that your interior group is negative and your exterior group is positive.  Group the two groups and you now have a whole bottle to work with.

Notice how light now reflects from the interior and exterior surfaces of the bottle.  In darkened glass, this is less apparent, but in light glass it is quite obvious.

Troubleshooting

Occasionally you may encounter a problem when making a bottle using this method.  There are many things that can cause the problem.

Instead of having a plain bottle, notice the shapes that are rendering in the bottle.

Thanks to Pedro da C.Federighi for pointing this potential error out and for the image to the right.
Possible causes:
  • The objects were not made positive or negative. (basic boolean rules were not followed)
  • The groups were not made positive or negative.
  • The objects do not have the same material on all of them.
  • Transfer material in negative boolean is not checked.
  • The objects are not aligned properly.
  • The thickness of the walls of the glass is too large.
If all of these are ok, then the lighting may be a problem.  You may want to change the lighting in your scene. 

 

 

As a last resort, you may want to decorate the bottle and hide the imperfections in the decorations.
Practice, Practice, Practice.  That's what it takes to make things look right in Bryce.   Start with a basic boolean bottle and build on it to help you overcome this problem if you see it when making your bottles.

Go to Part 2 of the Bottles Tutorial

Home  |  Downloads  |  Links