Rendered in Cinema 4D 2026 and Octane
This renders was an important one to me as it drove me out of a pretty aggressive creative rut. Which is an adversity I always resonate with. 90% Of the time I feel creatively empty. It simply comes down to not having made any renders I resonated with.
Key takeaway. Most of the time you’re in a rut. You need to make something you really love.
WORKFLOW NOTES
The model I purchased to make this opened up my eyes in an interesting way. The actual foam and beer head liquid are all being driven entire by a texture map. Which is a method I had never thought of trying.
I of course did mix this with an absorption material to still create a thorough and completely realistic liquid feeling, but I kept it dense enough that I had to force a light right at the bottom of the glass to get it to illuminate. As Guinness is quite dense. In most real world scenarios that is the only time you’d see it illuminate. Images of my texture will be below.
Lighting is always simple and never overdrawn. We’re looking at one key light for all assets in the scene including the background. Which the glass is ignoring because on the glass we need soft gradients to create pleasing falloff.
Condensation is one marker I also want to touch on as it trips people up a lot. Mainly because of option fatigue.
There is an abundance of ways to pull off condensation. Each one lends itself to the actual outcome we want. If you want animated condensation, it could be wise to make a particle setup. But that is also your longest, heaviest and most difficult way to do it.
There’s two things I did and do most of the time I am doing condensation which I did here.
The first one is a condensation map which is linked above. This of course goes in the roughness and bump. Creating realistic long streaks of water which is key for satisfying condensation. I typically also mix this with GSG fingerprint type maps to create a bit of a messed up feel so it’s not just all perfect water.
The next is out actual bubble scatter. I usually do this with cloners. There’s one absolute important factor when creating condensation and that is that none of the water droplets should ever touch.
If you look at your car after it’s been raining. You will never see droplets intersecting. Why? Because they conjoin when they do. So there’s always this illusion of seperation.
Nowe we could use a Volume Builder on the Scatter to emulate that, but like I said. That can become option fatigue. It can quite often be deminishing returns, when what sells is nearly always just the circle packed feel of none of the droplets touching.
Using Cloners. Assuring scale variation nad using the Push Apart Effector to keep them distant. This is how I did it.
Every other asset I used is linked above.
ASSETS USED
