How To Render Liquid Inside of a Transparent Object in Visualize

To begin, follow the settings in the image below, and adjust as needed.

 Apply the Ice Cube Appearance

I created a copy of the Solid Glass Appearance and applied it to the ice cubes. Using a copy of the appearance allowed me to adjust the settings for the ice cubes independently from the glass itself.

After experimenting with various appearance settings, it turned out using the same settings as I did for the glass gave me the most realistic look of an ice cube.

This is a good time to talk about the Index of Refraction (IOR) setting. Adjusting this setting controls the degree of refraction, which essentially controls the degree of which the environment lighting bends/warps as it passes through the appearance. The higher the value set for the IOR, the more the light will distort as it passes through the surfaces of the ice cube geometry.

The ice cubes were modeled so that every face had curvature, which produced very realistic reflections and refractions. When rendering a model with organic shapes such as ice cubes, it is best to avoid planar surfaces whenever possible, as flat surfaces won’t scatter the light as it would in a real ice cube.

See the Solid Glass Appearance settings used for the ice cubes in the image below. 

Apply the Margarita “Liquid” Appearance:

I chose the “Champagne” appearance from the Visualize Cloud Library to use for the appearance of liquid within the glass. Like the Solid Glass, the Champagne appearance uses the “Glass” appearance type, giving us the same options for setting the appearance as a solid and adjusting the IOR and Color Density values.

The Champagne appearance differs from the Solid Glass because it also has a Specular texture applied. This texture is built in to the appearance to give the look of bubbles within the Champagne. The Margarita does not have bubbles, but I was able to scale down the size of the texture (bubbles) to add a subtle cloudy look to the liquid.

Using appearances that include textures like Specular will greatly help in boosting the realism of the appearance and how it interacts with the environment lighting. See the Champagne settings in the image below.

Create a Formation for Sharing with Friends

After we are happy with how the margarita looks, the obvious next final step is to create more margaritas to share with friends. An excellent feature in Visualize is the Formation tool. This tool allows you to pattern copies of the model in specific arrangements.

The first step to creating this formation is to copy/paste the margarita model to create the desired number of margaritas. I created four additional copies for a total of five margaritas.

After we have created the multiple copies of the model, the next step is to select them all and create a formation. There are various formation patterns that can be applied and I chose to use the Circle formation and increased the spacing value so the models did not overlap.

With models and camera positioned as you want, the last step is to render. 

Enjoy your margaritas!

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