One of our recent project for a beauty product advertising. It’s a hydrogen water treatment, that you can spray on almost everything, on your skin, on your toothbrush, on your plants, or even you can consume it as a drinking water. Our task is to recreate this bottle in CG, and when you touch the bottom of the actual product, there is a tiny switch that starts the “elektrolisis” process, a water molecule breaking process. Marked by a thin blue light that goes on inside the bottle, creating these tiny bubbles that float from the bottom to the top of the water’s surface.

The bottle was modeled and textured in Maya, and the rest was done in Houdini, molecule (those H+ and H2 molecules’ process) and background animation were done in After Effects. We created from scratch, a particle simulation that will swirl up from the bottom to the top, and when they touch the bottle’s straw, the bottle’s inner edge, and the water’s surface, they will stick there for about few seconds, then disappeared randomly. For the sake of natural look, we add a randomization to the bubble’s size and we also added a noise to our particle simulation, this noise will make a more random movement to the particle when they swirl, so it won’t feel like a directed particle movement…

Rendering is a real challenge here. As everybody knows, water and a thick glass are bad combinations. Both need high IOR (Index of Refraction) to simulate a light bending inside these materials, this phenomenon we see in our everyday life, such as why a straw never look straight when we put it inside the water, because water bends light when light passes through it, the same happens with a thick glass. It took 8-15 minutes to render a frame, took as full 5 days and nights to render (please do not compare to those who owns a few of high spec PCs or render farm 🙂 ), with those water and bottle high IOR.