About This Project
Amber glass, dried cotton, dark blue. The stems stand in the vase, and the light comes in from one side. Its glass is moulded with a faceted pattern, and each facet grabs some light. The amber looks warm, almost glowing, because the set behind it is cool. And the cotton bolls are soft and fluffy, sitting right up against hard glass.
Glass punishes sloppy modeling
Glass is hard to render well. Really hard. Light enters, bends, bounces around inside, and leaves at some other point. The wall thickness changes all of that. So does the exact shape of the pattern pressed into the glass. Walls too thin? Then it’s a soap bubble. Get the pattern wrong and the reflections stop matching what a real vase shows. So we built the wall thickness and the pattern to match the real piece.
The light
Most of the work here is done by one warm light from the side. It passes through the amber, and the vase looks lit from within. It also skims across the pattern, so each facet gets its own highlight. Why dark blue? It’s the complementary colour to amber, and it pushes the vase warmer and richer. There’s a soft pool of light on the table too, which keeps the vase from floating.
True to scale
We built the model to the vase’s real dimensions. Sounds minor. It isn’t, once the vase goes into a room scene, onto a shelf, or next to other products. Get the scale wrong and it looks off in context, even if it looks perfect by itself.
Price and timing
Decorative objects like this are priced by the hours they take at 20 USD an hour. Our price table starts at about 80 USD and one day for a simple piece and about 200 USD and two to three days for a typical product. Glass with a detailed pattern takes a bit longer than a plain shape because of the material work. A scene like this one starts at about 120 USD an image. The details are on our 3D product rendering services page.
The cotton stems are easy to overlook, but they help. Real cotton bolls are fluffy and a bit uneven. Next to the hard glass, they give your eye something soft to land on. We modeled them uneven on purpose, so no two bolls look the same.
What else the model can do
Homeware brands often sell the same vase in several glass colours: clear, smoke, green, amber. Here each colour is just a material change on the model we already have. Put it on white for a shop. Put it in an interior on a sideboard or a dining table. Spin it 360. It can also be exported for AR, so customers can see its size on their own shelf.
For homeware and decor brands, the economics of rendering instead of shooting are covered in our article on lifestyle product photography.
Glass objects also benefit from motion. A slow camera move around the vase lets the reflections travel across the pattern, which shows the quality of the glass far better than any still.
Let us know if you’ve got an interesting project and want to work together!
