I’ve used Cinema 4D for years, and am comfortable, but I would like to be equally (nay, more) comfortable with Blender.
My learning and transferring skills is based on what I know, and my testing is to create a scene in C4D, render, and try to recreate in Blender.
This is one such scene, and whilst the C4D render could be improved, it’s closer to what I want than the Blender render.
Using Cycles, if I could match the C4D render in Blender, then I could start refining, but I’m not sure where I’m missing stuff now.
Ignore the waves on the bottle in the C4D render, I simply haven’t figured out how to achieve that in Blender yet. It’s more the overall look I’, trying to get close to, so advice would be appreciated.
I should add, I know the lighting differs (I lost the original HDR image), and the camera is different, but that’s all fixable. I’m more concerned that the water is very wrong in the Blender render (and I matched IoR, both reflection and refraction), the lid looks too metallic and the bottle looks too CG./ In the Cinema render they look more natural to me.
For the record, both are my work, and so I was able to duplicate the material properties as close as possible.
Increasing bounces in render settings helps a bit. (Usually going from default starting settings to the “full global” preset improves things.) It’s a small part, but it does play some role.
However the cycles glass shader on it’s own tends to be very lossy. (Topic of many discussions, because it’s a bit annoying to deal with.) Basically rays fail to make it through and are lost for whatever reason during the calculation. (Not purposely being attenuated as part of absorption, although it seems like a tint to the material in effect.) The way to get around this is to mix with the transparent shader using both weight and lightpaths to control the factor. The quickest material setup usually clears it up but loses some amount of refraction, it takes a bit more convoluted node setup to preserve the refraction to some extent while improving clarity and getting the desired result.
I didn’t look at your .blend at the moment, but the other thing is glass material only works correctly if there is a wall thickness. (I mention this because some render engines do things differently. In my opinion Cycles is more correct in this regard, even if not always more convenient.) If you have a single-walled mesh to represent the bottle plastic, you’ll need to use the solidify modifier. The refraction effect depends on the distance between forward-facing and back-facing normals. Also the inner mesh for the liquid should be separated by some itty-bitty amount from the bottle to avoid any possible Z-fighting.
