Render of Haku Vodka

This project featuring the Haku Vodka bottle was created solely for portfolio and practice purposes, with no commercial or other intent. The beautifully crafted glass bottle, from a well-known Japanese craft vodka, served as a subject for exploring glass lighting techniques and rendering practice.

Lighting pure glass objects, like bottles or drinking glasses, is one of the trickiest jobs in 3D. Glass doesn’t just reflect light — it also bends it, splits it into colors, and lets some of it pass through. That means every light source, shadow, and background element can change how the glass looks. If the lighting is even slightly off, the glass can look flat, cloudy, or fake.

Rendering is just as challenging. Glass materials require accurate refraction (how light bends) and caustics (the bright patterns light makes after passing through glass). These effects are expensive for the computer to calculate, so render times can be much longer than for solid objects. On top of that, you have to fight issues like fireflies (tiny bright noise spots) and keep the edges of the glass sharp without losing the soft light inside it.
The main challenges are:

• Controlling reflections so they show the shape without distracting glare.
• Balancing transparency and detail so the object doesn’t disappear into the background.
• Managing render noise caused by complex light paths inside the glass.

Even in real photography, glass is one of the hardest materials to light — in 3D, you have to simulate all of that physics from scratch.