What a great contest! There’s so many amazing images already, but here’s my submission.
The Concept:Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (2006) is one of my favorite movies, mostly because of how prophetic it has become over the past decade. One part of the movie that always sticks with me is how water is replaced with a product called ‘Brawndo’.
Watch this video for an explanation;
https://youtu.be/lUTZmSyDErg?t=4sOR watch the entire movie, because it is great (and scary accurate at times).
The Modeling:One of the aspects I aimed for during this project was 100% of the modeling by me. Every piece of geometry here was modeled by myself in Blender 2.79
The Materials:Obviously the whole point of the contest was the materials. The funnel (foreground object), the red tiles, and the ‘Brawndo’ fluid are all ‘cloudy plastic’. The sink basin, the faucet, the metal pipes in the background are all ‘metal’ shaders of course. I also utilized the new ‘metallic paint’ shader’ in labels to layer up the grunge. I re-created the can/box artwork in Adobe Illustrator based off other fan art from the web (but recreated from scratch by me).
The Lighting:I was going for a very eriee mood, I also wanted to play with color theory and physical lights. There’s 6 bays of ‘fluorescent’ light boxes above the scene which I modelled in to get some accurate shapes with the lighting. Kelvin temps and bounce cards were used to get certain colors to bounce around the scene. One of the Aversis 6K Kitchen HDRIs was used to get baseline reflections. (From the Keyshot 7 Asset pack)
Post:I tried to keep post to a minimum (you can see the raw render in the stack below). I basically used it to color grade and tune exposure/gamma. Nothing extreme, and zero retouching/airbrushing.
Overall, I had a great time with this, the modeling definitely ate most of my timeline, but luckily, I got really good results out of Keyshot fairly fast and I made the deadline just in time.