Scudder's Site

Page Size:
Sm.  Med.  Lrg.

A Virtual Wine Label

Texture mapping for Photorealism in 3ds Max

This personal project was too create a wine label in 3d that captured the fine detail of high-quality printing and foil stamping. Read on to see the four graphics used to texture this 3d surface.
[ See the final image. ]

Image 1 - The diffuse (colour) map:

The diffuse map supplies the colour. It looks dark because it's not lit yet. The gold will end up being bright because of the glare of the 3d lights, so just the colour is set here. There is a little noise in the paper, to simulate the imperfections of reality. The script font awesome - lots of minute edge detail.

This, and the following maps appear here at half the resolution I used. It was necessary to use 600 dpi - although I started with 1200 dpi, which was too intense - in order to simulate the fine detail and light-play on the 3d surface of the inks and foil stamps.

Image 2 - The Shininess (glossiness) map:

This image describes which parts of the label should reflect the lights in the scene. Dark areas are matte, and white ones are totally glossy. The shades of grey here keep things less extreme. The noise in the paper diffuse map is (barely) copied here, and there is some noise in the "1", which will shimmer a little as a result. The black ink is more shiny than the gold foil, which might seem wrong, but the black characters are very small and need to look glossy, while a more dispersed highlight on the foil will make it shine more like the real thing (if glossy it might look glassy).

Image 3 - Specular Level (Highlight Colour) Map:

The colour and intensity of each glossy highlight is defined here. There might be a little colour in here, (which would give things a 'pearl' sort of look) but mainly I'm doing more to make the foil shimmer by making the surface shine different levels of brightness all over its surface.

Image 4 - Bump (Relief) Map:

In this image, white areas are raised, and black areas are lower. It's really low-contrast, (just worked out that way) so I have lightened the right-half for you to see. This one was particularly hard to get right, and by the way, bump mapping in 3ds Max really sucks.

The Final Render:

After the maps have been layered on to the 3d surface, I just point some lights and cameras at it in 3ds Max, and leave the machine to render for a few hours (there's some high-def footage that I'm going to post here soon).The light to the left is cool, and the one to the right is warm, so you'll see two distinct colours in the glossy highlights. The image at the top is adapted from an Escher lithograph. •