A scene I made of a melon sour with realism as a goal. I still have loads of things I want to tweak but I had to round it up at some point so here it is. Some miscellaneous notes for my future self about the things I did in this piece.

• Clip meshes that are adjacent to glass to get the right look.
• Crank up the values for total, glossy, transmission and transparent to get rid of black areas in glass.
• Check normals for weird looking surfaces.
• Use non-color data for roughness, normals and height nodes and srgb data for the basemap.
• For roughness, white is matte and black is glossy.
• Mix an imperfection texture with the roughness texture to create smudges on the surface.
• Control Shift click with the node wrangler addon enabled to preview the output of a node.
• Texture coordinate node into a mapping node is the preferred method of manipulating textures (not resizing them in the UV editor).
• Enable caustics by checking shadow caustics on the light, Object > Shading > Caustics > Cast/Receive Shadow Caustics for relevant objects.
• Mark vertices as seams as locations to 'cut open' in UV unwrap.
• Check Render > Film > Transparent for a transparent background (I always forget where this is).
• Group nodes into a node group which can be entered and exited with tab. Append/Link a node group to import it into another blender file.
• Link a volume absorption/principled volume node into the volume output for clear and cloudy liquids respectively.

Some behind the scene progress pictures.

The first iteration I made with a cloudy liquid.

Decided to model a bottle of an actual product and learnt some things about texturing in the process. Took some shortcuts for the cap since it wasn't visible in the final render.

And ofcourse a solid view.