Whiskey glass — a moody beverage lighting study

A beverage lighting study in Houdini, rendered with Karma XPU. The goal was rich glass and liquid under dramatic, warm light — a single hard source raking the ribbed tumbler so the whiskey glows from inside while the room falls off to green-black.

Most of the time went into the liquid-to-glass interface: nested dielectrics and where the meniscus meets the rim. The refraction there is still not perfect if you zoom in — a denser mesh at the contact line is the fix. Good enough to ship into the product-studies set.