6th Week - Guinness Time!

Now, I knew that this wasn't going to be a simple object to make but...by jiminy, Iv already been pretty exasperated by the most basic of things

Firstly, it began with trying to get the spline the right sorta shape for the beer glass, y'know, so it looks mildly believable. But, as it turned out, took me (and a few others willing to help a guy in need!) a good hour or so of line tools, extruding and re-sizing - and this was just to get the
curvature and glass form even!

As the image clearly shows, creating a pint glass, let alone any other type of tall, 'slim-at-the-bottom-and-flared-out-at-the-top' glass, is definitely not for the easily irritated.
The irritation begins when, once you have drawn out the spline, lathed it and studied the final result, you find out that its not exactly the same as what you had in mind, and so there's still more faffing around to be undertaken.
So, I have the 'glass' and it needs to be altered..how difficult is it?!
Very, as it happens, or perhaps it was my lack of subtlety and deftness of touch that meant each small adjustment would make far too extreme changes (and the fact the object was beginning to 'digitally-fracture' along many of the delicate construction lines used to make up the splines!)

Another aspect to take into account was the complexity of the texture/material editor. I wanted to create the usual glassy reflections and refractions of light filtering through, and the sombre, thick liquid that is Guinness held the glass.

But, typically, the presets that are part of the program weren't exactly what I expected, with no presets named 'snazzy-pint glass-reflections' or 'Guinness-like ale-colour' unfortunately, and so I decided to alter my own to get as close as possible.

The first custom was a bitmap that Id saved from messing around in Photoshop with black and white brushstrokes, and the second one is an adaptation of a walnut-wood preset - neither really demonstrated the qualities I was looking for.

Hence the final result with this prototype not looking too impressive, I have to admit!

I was determined to do something right, so I brought onto the screen a saved JPEG of the Guinness glass I was trying to emulate and decided to try and follow the outline of the glass with the spline tool, probably the easiest way to get the shape and form I wanted, I guessed! So, to do this, I constructed a plane flat onto the board on-screen, rotated it so that It was standing up, selected the Guinness image from my files and imported it onto the drawing board, thus giving me a easy method to draw round the glass.

Max allowing me to do this with an imported full-sized glass gave me an idea that meant I could probably import other BITMAP files that could have come from edited JPEGS in Photoshop or a hybrid of other imagery from before.

As the image shows, I was able to get a closeup: a section of the reflection and the condensation from the full-size Guinness glass image, and then combine those base statistics with another hybrid of reflections I concocted from before to create the remarkably accurate rendition of the material on the bottom right.

After some careful consideration (and perhaps some disruption of the material editor - I'm sure some of the levels alterations I managed to do weren't part of the preset list!) I managed to get a set of three pretty accurate material that aren't too dissimilar
from what I had in mind originally.
Now of course, its always going to turn out slightly altered to your initial planned idea, but this has come along quite nicely so far.

Lets hope I wont take as this long with the bunch o' roses..