This Blender session was pretty chill. It mostly consisted of minor changes to make the overall scene more aesthetically pleasing. I ended up skipping the animation part of the tutorial because I felt like for what I was learning and what I set out to do with this inquiry, that animation could be another facet of something a little farther down the line. Animation would be fun, to be sure, but at the moment I’m content with learning how to model and how to set up and render a still scene. And so, thus began the process of finalizing my scene and checking for mistakes.

One of the first things I did was look at my face orientation. To do this, I opened my Viewport Overlays drop-down and selected Face Orientation under Geometry. Anything highlighted blue is correct, but anything red is facing the “wrong direction.” This may be kind of confusing, but for example, the inside of my cube was red because Blender thought that the outside of the cube is what would be facing the camera rather than the inside faces. This is an issue, because anything highlighted red in this mode is likely to have incorrect shading. To correct this, all you have to do is select the whole mesh in edit mode (by clicking it and hitting A), hit Shift+N, and tick the box in the “Recalculate Normals” tab that opens up to invert the colour to blue. This lets Blender know what the correct face is that will be facing the camera.

The red faces wouldn’t have had much of an effect for this piece, since they’re out of the render frame anyway, but it’s still good to know how to correct this!
Fixing the issue. Note the box in the lower left corner.

Following this, I reoriented the donuts to look a little more dynamically stacked on the plate, added some more decorative sprinkles to my front-facing donut, modified the exposure range of my scene (by selecting False Colour in the Colour Management tab), shifted my render camera up a bit, swapped a few of the icing colours, and then… I hit F12 to start my render. It’s currently rendering at the moment, since this process usually takes a while, but I will leave you on the edge of your seat for now and you can look forward to seeing my masterpiece in the final blog post! Below, I’ve included the video by Blender Guru that I followed for this part of the tutorial.