Bottles and curves

Fast moving consumer goods such as beverages are commonly packaged in bottles. Showing a bottle that represents a product is fundamental to promoting and selling such products. There’s no mystery there. But where do those perfect and stylised images come from?

One of my earliest memories from when I was getting into photography was of watching youtube tutorials for product photography. Before that point I had no idea about how much fuss that goes into making those ‘photos’. Yes, they were photos, back circa 2010, made with a camera and retouching. Fortunately today there’s a relatively new tool for creating perfection: rendering.

I like to revisit that story every now and again, especially when there’s an update, like now in 2022. This time around we can create an image of a glass bottle with a bezier curve, that in turn is made from nothing more than a few connected dot points.

At this point my goto for creating bottles is:

1. Open a new scene
2. Add a bezier curve
3. Contour the curve into a bottle profile
4. Add rotate modifier, to generate an extrusion along the z axis
5. Add glass material

That’s it.

Here is something that I prepared later; same idea, bit more work.