Got carried away with the tutorials. Let me just show you what the instructor’s piece looked like next to mine.
The reason my canvas is square is he had us make them 1080 by 1080, and I went with the challenge. The reason his is no longer square here is … you got me. I just had to experiment with cutting a copy of my donut in half and submerging part of it in the coffee (also made it chocolate). Just wanted to see how it would look in the liquid. Sure, why not make some floating sprinkles? I designed the fork and spoon, and my plate. Also switched the marble table top for a more geometric look.
Below in transparent mode, you can see how much of the donut dips into the coffee.
And as I mentioned in my last post, I’m fascinated that everything is created with math, and the only photos used are for the marble tabletop and the condensation droplets on the glass. The rest is sculpture, as you can see more clearly below.
I can’t take credit for much other than the placement of my objects, the composition, and a few variations. But I put enough effort tinkering with every little detail, that I feel like it’s my own creation.
Allow me to point out some interesting details — interesting because they were deliberate and could be done via computer.
You can see the spoon through the condensation, droplets and glass. Of course you can see the donut under water, but also reflected on the glass saucer and through the saucer onto the marble. The white line separating the pieces of marble tile is visible through the saucer, and then reflects up in an arc onto the glass cup. Trust me, I labored over the precise angles of everything, and was rotating the cup and donut on the Z axis repeatedly; repositioning the fork and spoon, and sliding the marble tile around… The focal point is the condensation on the glass, and you can see the pink donut is getting out of focus because of the depth of field. I was going a bit Mondrian with the table top.
And so you can see you can be very technical about your composition and placement of everything, not to mention the lighting, and directing the reflections and shadows with it.
The world of Blender is an enormous one, and I’m still a beginner with a few intermediate tricks under my belt. I can use all my artistic background to make things a bit more interesting, and I probably already know enough to do dozens of pieces, but I’m busy working on hammering home the basics like I did with Photoshop. I’ve got really a lot of catching up to do with 3D modeling and creating scenes — the knowledge base is encyclopedic — so I’ve been working at it about 5 hours a day for the last few weeks. I probably can’t keep up that pace because life requires I do other things.
Stay tuned for my continuing exploration of Blender. I’m compiling a list of insane things I want to try.
~ Ends
Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
Deee-Lish!
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Amazing detailed work, and it looks tasty too!
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Incredible progress. Armed with the latest tools and the best of traditions – and unfettered by worries you are somehow cheating by combining both (which is nonsensical) – you are bound to create more swaths of amazing imagery. Crackin’ job!
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Looks amazing. But there is one thing that bugs me a bit. And it’s that the sprinkles on the dipped doughnut seem very flat. They have no shading on them. Since the light comes from the right, I feel there should be some shaping shadows on the left side of the sprinkles themselves. Possibly move the shine on the chocolate closer to the right edge too, rather than in the middle of the chocolate coating. For realism, light consistency is very important. But other than that little nitpick, it really looks great. 🙂 I don’t think I’d have the patience to create something like this myself.
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Yeah, for whatever reason the light is overblown on the sprinkles and chocolate donut. Theoretically there must be light on the sprinkles in the coffee, but they are half submerged, so there’s no ambient occlusion shadows to begin with.
I could add another light, etc., but my lighting skills aren’t all that sophisticated just yet.
Blender just keeps going. There’s no learning all the skills and then going off on your own. The program itself is updating every few months, and people are making add-ons and discovering new ways of doing things. Then there are ancillary programs like Substance Painter.
Basically, it branches out into every aspect of visual reality.
But, yeah, thanks for pointing out those details. In fact I saw the same things, and
they are instances where the eye can’t be fooled by virtual reality unless it’s really perfect.
Another thing bout how wonderfully complex and sophisticated it all gets, the main reason I got into Blender was to do organic sculpting to make models for digital paintings. I haven’t even started doing organic sculpting, as I’m saving that, and have become obsessed with hard-surface modeling. Meanwhile, I dropped the need to make anything into a digital painting, and prefer just doing it all in 3d.
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It is beautiful but I guess the process requires a lot of patience
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