How The Icon Was Created

December 11, 2015

You might think making an icon is easy. You’d be wrong.

When Theodore told me he needed an icon, I knew just what he needed. I decided to draw inspiration from the Wine icon (by using wine as a motif, obviously) but thought that Vindo’s icon could use a little more… flair. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Wine’s icon is nice in a minimalist sort of way; however, I decided I wanted a little more of that realistic-ish liquid sim.

So I pulled up a 3D model of a wine glass I had on hand (believe me, finding the model took some work. I actually made a whole new icon with a different wine glass that you can see in early versions, but we soon discarded.) I pulled up Autodesk Maya and imported my model, using Maya version 2015 because 2015 and later incorporate Autodesk’s proprietary liquid sim tech. I pulled a sweet sim from the wine glass, then made an Alembic cache for importing into Cinema 4D. I textured everything there, then rendered on alpha when I had something good-looking enough to pass Theodore’s litmus test of sorts. Finally, I threw it into Photoshop to tweak the alpha a little bit, and sent it off to Theodore. Hope you like it!

Joseph