Want Some Donut (2020)
My first ever complete project was made following the now famous donut tutorial by Blender Guru. This project taught me the basics of modeling, shading, compositing and even editing. To make my donut different, though, I covered it in hot chocolate instead of pink frost.
DAY 1 - 1
The modeling started by adding a simple torus to the scene, a primitive mesh, and tweaking its basic variables: inner and outer radius. After that, I proceeded to move some of its vertices, thus creating a bunch of bumps and imperfections, as well as sculpting the middle of it with the standard brush.
With my lumpy donut in place, I selected its upper vertices and duplicated them. Therefrom, I created a separate object, the chocolate, over which I applied the solidify modifier to give it thickness.
Lastly, I used the grab and inflate brush to shape the chocolate as if it was dripping from the top of the donut.
DAY 1 - 2
After modeling, I went to the materials to add a little bit of color to my work, just raw RGBs. I also put a blue plane to start working on the composition of my scene.
DAY 1 - 3
That's when I started exploring more of the BSDF Shader, especially the roughness of the chocolate and the subsurface scattering of the donut to make it look more organic. I changed the color of the plane to match that of the chocolate.
DAY 2
Here's when I'm actually moved to the shader editor to properly work on the textures of the model. I textured painted the middle of the donut with a cloud brush of white, and made a procedural material for its surface using a noise texture, a ColorRamp node and a displacement node.
Later on, I added a hair particle system on the top of the chocolate with a collection of objects with different colors to make up for the sprinkles.
DAY 3 - 1
The third day was dedicated to creating the mug and the coffee that would compose the scene along with the donut. I got to use a cyllinder to model the mug from a photo reference. The handle, on the other hand, required me to use the spin tool to make a more accurate curve. As for the material, very high transmission and very low roughness, with a 1.42 refractive index.
DAY 3 - 2
The coffee itself was made duplicating the inner vertices of the mug and scaling them down to fit within the glass, and then adding a face to the top of it. The material required volume absorption, as it looks darker the closer it is to the bottom of the mug. Its refractive index is also slightely different from that of water, around 1.34, instead of 1.33.
Lastly, I added a bunch of free textures from the website Poliigon.com, including the pink walls, the marble, and the normal map for the condensed water in the mug.
