The Decaller tool is fun and easy to use. Here, we'll use a beer bottle as our model, and use this great tool to add a label to the bottles surface.

This tutorial requires:

Pixels3D | studio | v3.7 and above
Photoshop
2 bottles of the finest bottled ale you can buy!

Since this is mostly about one tool I'll be skipping steps in creating our bottle and focus on the decaller tool and how its used. First, pull a bottle out of the refrigerator and sample it. Make sure its the right beer we want to model. Then download the shaders and launch Pixels3D while we drink our ale.

After downloading the shader and finishing our first bottle, get another bottle to sample while we model the ale we just finished. Select Shape>Spline ( B-Spline ) and in the Front Window Pane, start modeling the side and shape of the empty bottle. Start with the inside and work your way around to to the outside and back to the center until you have something similar to the image on the right.

Next select Shape>Lathe, click OK , and Reshape>Subdivide by 2u/2v. Feel free to use more subdivisions for better control. Open Object Info ( cmd-i ) and hide the original spline. We'll reuse the spline later for liquids.

Open the Shader Manager ( cmd-w ) and load our Beer_Bottle_Brown or Green as the shader.

Now that we have modeled our bottle, add some bump and then finaly our label to the surface of the bottle.

Save the model and Launch Photoshop. Create a B&W image (it doesn't have to be large) with a black background colour. Create some white text as shown on the right. Save as an 8-bit grayscale PICT image.

Reopen our Bottle file in Pixels and select the Lathe object ( the bottle ). Choose Utilities>Decaller and, with the lathe still selected, in the Camera View Pane, click and drag on the object. You should see a red box forming around the surface of the object. Once the red guide is aligned to your liking, (picture top-right ) for our bump, release the mouse button. You will be prompted with a dialog, pictured right.

Here we can set an image's location on the surface, since this is for our bump map, select bump from the pop-up menu and click OK. This will add an Image Map node to our bump input automatically and scale it. We may need to rescale the image to fit it nicely on the lathe.

•The nicest thing about this tool is, it can be repeated as many times as you like. You can literally stack images upon images.

If we were to render it, we would see something like pictured right. I used plain white shader for a better representation of the surface.

Repeat the steps above, only this time, for the label, select the Diffuse Color input instead of Bump. This will add the image to the existing shader. The label image should be located right about here:

After a little tweaking of the image map in the Diffuse node, the label should fit perfectly around the bottles shape.

Here is the bottle I chose, Liefmans Oud Bruin, enjoy and drink up!