Double Packaging

At a Glance

A Blender exercise in presenting a 3D object in a way you could never actually photograph: a bottle vacuum-sealed inside a zip bag, shrink-wrapped tight and rendered from an angle no real vacuum bag could hold still for. This project became the basis for the render approach I later used on Cybercoffee.

This started as a Blender exercise — practice at presenting a 3D object in a way that actually shows it off, and it became the basis for how I later approached the Cybercoffee render. Credit for the idea goes to Intranetgirl, whose tutorial I followed to get started. The point of doing it in 3D specifically: you can't actually photograph a vacuum bag suspended mid-rotation like this — in real life it just sits flat on a surface. Rendering it let the bag hang and turn the way gravity never would, around an equally unusual pairing: a bottle, vacuum-sealed inside a zip bag.

Modeling

The vial body modeled from a single profile and lathed, with the cap split off as its own object so it could be UV-unwrapped cleanly for the label band.

Topology

Bag subdivided to ~250k tris — enough resolution for the cloth sim to resolve fine wrinkles where the plastic suctions onto the bottle without exploding into noise.

Vacuum Sim

The payoff of the simulation: the bag pulled taut and wrinkled exactly like real shrink-wrap, sucked down tight around the bottle.

Shading

Bag mixes Transparent BSDF for clarity, Translucent BSDF for the milky scatter on the bunched areas, and Glossy with IOR-driven Fresnel for the wet plastic highlights.

Rendering

Cycles output configured at 1920×1400 with a single key light at 6500K, denoised in the compositor before any of the final angles were picked.