How to make a water bottle?

[Naiman Broome]

Haha , I know it sounds silly for expert modeller , me included, but I am wondering how to make a more realistic water bottle in secondlife, so this means transparency issues... How it could be the best approach to solve those?

I modeled thebottle, inside and outside, the cap , water inside, but I have tried to give its transparency , but the liquid inside would disappear because the game only allows one layer of transparency textures with alpha blending and not multiple ones ... The other Idea I had was to eventually fully bake reflections and all into the texture throught rendering it in vray in 3dsmax, but then the transparent and refractiveness wouln't be caught ... so I am a bit puzzled , I know this it may look like a stupid issue but I am finding no solution so far

[arton Rotaru]

Doing something like this won't be perfect in SL. What I do is omitting the inside glass where the liquid is. By adding an edgeloop on the inside, detach, select the detached part, flip normals, cap the top.

Edited April 21, 2021 by arton Rotaru

[Naiman Broome]

Ehm do u have a visible sample of what ou described?

[arton Rotaru]

[Beev Fallen]

what arton posted, plus 'hacky' normal map for the liquid and whole bunch of place-specific projectors:

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

The key element is really to limit yourself to a single "layer" of alpha at all times and to use an opaque surface & materials to simulate the "far" side.

I'd avoid including a projector light in a store product however, these can be fairly taxing and should be left at the discretion of the land owner.

@Beev Fallen's example is pretty stunning, here is a simple one which might make it easier to tell what is actually going on.

1. the glass's outer walls are translucent with specular/environment.
2. the inner walls of the glass are opaque.
3. the liquid layer is just a section of the inside walls with different material properties and glows a little, it is fully opaque too.
4. the top layer of the liquid is almost fully transparent and is only there to change the color of the liquid slightly compares to what is seen through the glass.
5. Ideally you might also want to re-order all the vertices if you have an overlap of alpha like i have between the glass "foot" and step or you'll get alpha sorting issues.
6. if you have a label, a nice touch is to reserve a separate face on the backside of the glass that you can darken a bit, to suggest that you are seeing the back side of the label.

This is peripheral to the question but, as with all SL projects, and game related assets, it is of utmost importance to try to keep your texture usage to a minimum, fully readable labels can be a fun photoshop exercise, but since bottles are by definition background filler objects, you only need as much on those textures as is needed to convey the "idea".

Likewise, unless your normal maps contain very important and essential details, it doesn't hurt to test them at half or even quarter resolution, especially for something like glass, which is generally fairly smooth and rounded.

And for specular maps? if you can get away using the default SL white texture, or even a 16x16px? do it.