A Blender render

Raytraced Port

Something a bit different today - I created this scene totally on the computer using the free modelling/rendering program called Blender (get it at www.blender.org).  With these kinds of programs you basically define the shapes of your models, for example the bottles, with what materials and textures you want for their surface.  You have a virtual camera that frames your scene and things like virtual lights to light your scene.  The program will compute things like shadows, reflections etc.

The label on the bottle, the wood texture on the bench, the brick texture on the wall, and the cork texture, I downloaded as normal images using Google search.  I then "wrapped" these textures on the objects.  I also defined things such as transparency and reflection on the bottle and glass etc.  As you can see you can even define the camera's depth of field to give a virtual blur to out of focus areas.

To the right you see the bottle as its shape is defined.  Blender gives you various tools to shape things - I started out with a straight cylinder object and ended up with the bottle.

This is the type of program used in many movies these days to create whatever the makers want - for example a dragon flying around or something.  I'm still very much a beginner at this stuff but I do enjoy it - I'm still at the stage of modelling nice symmetrical objects like in this scene - its a lot trickier to do organic type shapes like a human head for example.  Programs like Blender also allow you to animate things so its not just for "still life" images like this.