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Behind the Scenes: DeSSSert

6

About

My name is Damien Parish and I live in Indiana, USA. I have been using 3D applications for the past 6 years. I have not had any formal training, I have just taught myself along the way.

Six years ago I was getting a slideshow ready for my wedding and came across a video of 2 rings spinning around. For some reason I loved that animation and I was intent on creating it for our video opener for the slide show. Everyday I would come home and attempt a new tutorial; you could say I was slightly addicted, which is still true.

I am fortunate that I get to use Blender at my job. They only had 3ds Max at first, which I never really liked. They allowed me to install and try out Blender, after finding out it was free. It took me a while, but after figuring out how it all worked I have not stopped using it. I design parts in Solidworks, then use blender to render the final stills and animations for our products. After I get home and everyone is in bed, I sit at my computer and make things for the fun of it.

Inspiration

What inspired me to create this project was watching the new Cinema 4D ProRender features in R20. I saw this beautiful scene created by MAXON Certified Instructor Yan Ge. This had some lighting techniques that I had never tried before. I also had not used SSS in any of my projects, so this seemed like it was going to be a fun challenge.

Modeling

The Cup and the internal objects were pretty simple to model. The cup was created by using the Screw Modifier after creating the profile. The chocolate and cream were made by duplicating the interior mesh of the cup, then closing the top. If you have made a cup with liquid in it, you will know what I mean. The top of the chocolate was made by pushing and pulling the top vertices by using proportional editing.

The Raspberries were from a tutorial I watched a long time ago.

The floor was a plane with a marble texture from Poliigon, set to be really reflective.

The Cherries were made by subdividing a cube into a circle, then using proportional editing to get the shape I wanted. Just scale, pushing and twisting will get you the result you’re looking for.

The plate was a plane extruded up with a Solidify Modifier on it.

The Cutting Board was a cube scaled into a rectangle, with some insets for the border details.

The Spoon was tricky for me. I ended up cutting a sphere in half, then scaling on the Z and X axis until I was happy with the shape. I used proportional editing to get the tip of the spoon slightly scaled in too. After that, I added a Solidify Modifier, applied it, then extruded out the handle. I used Loop Tools to get a circle at the end of the handle and scaled it on the Y axis. Then I grabbed some edges, beveled them, and used extrude to get the raised part at the end.

The Jello was made with the help of the Loop Tools add-on. I drew out the base of the Jello with a vertex, duplicated it, scaled it in slightly and used the “Loft” option within Loop Tools. Then I used the “Relax” option to get a smooth rounded top. The Jello cubes were just cubes with a displacement modifier on them.

Texturing

As far as the SSS material goes, I used the principled shader for all my materials. I set the Subsurface Scattering slider to 1 and messed with the radius option to get the look I wanted. That was really all that went into the SSS material.

All other objects were textured using the principled shader. The wood, marble, smudges on the glass, and spoon were all textures from Poliigon.com, if I remember right.

Lighting

Lighting was pretty simple; I did try the techniques used in the video by Yan Ge, but I didn’t like the result. I ended up going with an HDRI, and 2 emissive discs. One disc was over the cup and the other was over the jello cubes. I always use Filmic and adjust the curves for my contrast. You can get the HDRI here for free as well.

I hope this was helpful, I have never written a Behind the Scenes before and I hope everyone was able to get a good idea on how this was created. I might be remaking this project for another tutorial on my YouTube page. I actually just finished remaking the gold watch that was featured on blenderartists.org. The thumbnails of my videos are the final result of the tutorials.

About the Author

Damien Parish, Scene scale, always use proper scene scale!

 

 

 

About the Author

Abby Crawford

I've been a part of the BlenderNation team since 2018, producing Behind the Scenes and Meet the Artist features that highlight Blender artists and their work.

6 Comments

    • Haha thanks! Yes, I definitely did not want any fireflies in the scene. I rendered this at 7500 samples with Denoising turned on, and the radius set to 4. Thank you for checking out the article.

  1. Impressive. Food is hard to get right and I think you've done a great job. You mentioned you use Blender at work - can you tall us how what you use it for?

    • I work in SolidWorks making parts for aluminum extrusions. If we want to see a more realistic render, I export the SolidWorks file as an STL, then import it into blender.

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