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For this session, I followed two tutorial videos instead of one. Working off of my last update, this session was all about the environment, ambience, and general lighting and composition. To start, I got rid of the bright light source from my last update and replaced it with one that mimicked the lighting form the sun in real life. Blender has a feature called “World Properties” where you can add in a sky texture and a sun. From there, you can modify the sun’s position in the sky, size, rotation, and intensity. It’s default settings are accurate to the real world (including it’s size relative to Earth) and you can play around with it to fit your desired effect.

Problem was, even with the intensity turned down, the scene still felt very bright and didn’t match the lighting one would see in a real world kitchen. To remedy this, I added a cube mesh to surround my scene and carved a window into it. I did this by hitting I on the leftmost face of my cube to select the middle of the plane and hitting X to remove the middle of it. I then used vertices select and G to move the edges around to where I wanted them. I also had to make the rightmost plane completely black to avoid the light from the “sun” bouncing off of it onto my scene. After this, I added an area lamp (with low intensity and a yellow tinge) to gently hit the dark side of my donuts because in most houses there are usually other lights that affect a scene from afar, and this replicates that without being so harsh.

I also learned how to import add-ons to Blender. Blender Guru’s website, Poliigon, has an add-on that allows for the quick and easy importing of models and textures right into your Blender scene without having to go to the website in a web browser. This saves the hassle of downloading, unzipping, finding what you need when importing, etc. By hitting N, I can open a tab with a quick search feature that shows me what I can put into my scene. Using this, I imported a couple of decorations into my “kitchen” scene: A set of wooden utensils and a succulent. I also changed the backsplash from quartz to a brick texture that I liked because I felt like it made the scene a little less bland and a bit more homey. Below, I’ve included a link to the video that went over all of this!

The next video taught me about the compositing tab! This tab allows for more precise modifying of how light interacts with the materials in a scene. In this case, I used it to add a bit of lighting bloom and glare in my render. To do this I used more NODES. I’ve learned that you use nodes A LOT in Blender but they have so many uses and can do so much for your scene I can’t imagine not having them. There were multiple steps to the process of adding glare, and I’ve left a screenshot of the required node setup below.

I then went to my render options and played around in the colour management tab. This allowed me to modify the overall lighting of my scene, which I made a bit more saturated to give it a warmer tone. Following this, I also added a bit of lens distortion to my render camera to mimic a real-life camera. While it’s a subtle difference, it’s one of many small features that add to the overall sense of realism. The lens distortion was done with the nodes in the compositing tab again. I’ve included my final node setup below along with how the render looked before and after the addition of the nodes! All of these small changes combined to make quite the improvement!

And with that, I’m done for today! I only have a few more videos left in this comprehensive Blender tutorial and I plan to finish my Inquiry with the final video. I will make a video at that point to showcase my final result and demonstrate my learning! It has been incredibly fun and I’m so glad I chose to learn Blender through this playlist! Below is my final render of the day and the second video I used for this post.

Today I was able to give my sprinkles some colour and learn how to light a subject properly! Honestly my biggest takeaway from this session was how big of a difference lighting makes in the render. It’s honestly night and day.

I linked the materials of my sprinkles together to make the colour and shading settings apply to all of them, and also learned about a couple of new nodes. I used the Colour Ramp node to to assign colours to the sprinkles and the Object Info node to randomize them on the donut. Now, in terms of the actual donut, it’s DONE!! The following steps were about rendering and how to make the donut look pretty.

Finally the rendering process can begin. By default, Blender uses a program called EEVEE to render, which is the fastest, but it also creates the nastiest looking render known to man. SO, instead, I switched from EEVEE to Cycles which essentially renders it in real-time in the viewport. Cycles makes the render much prettier, but it works much slower. When the viewport is moving, the objects appear pixelated and choppy. When you stop moving the viewport around, it gradually sharpens. Below is a comparison between EEVEE and Cycles.

To minimize pixelated choppiness, I switched from my CPU to my GPU for rendering and ticked the “Denoise” option for when the viewport is in motion. Switching to my GPU made the process much faster, but it’s still only moving at the speed of what my laptop’s Apple M1 Pro chip is capable of. If I ever wanted to upgrade, Blender Guru brought my attention to one site where Blender users can label which chip they’re using and how fast it renders their scenes. This information can be found on Blender’s Open Data Benchmark page and essentially ranks the top chips available on the market.

With rendering settings in play, I learned a bit more about how to use the camera. Specifically, I learned about a feature that allows you to control the camera and viewport as if it were a video game. Hitting Shift+~ (tilde key) allows you to move around with the WASD keys. Once you like where your view is at, left clicking once will exit that mode. For people who are accustomed to gaming on a PC, this makes moving the camera around a LOT easier.

Next up was lighting. When light hits an object in real life, it scatters it a bit inside before leaving the object again. Sometimes, this bounces that light onto the surface of objects close by. To replicate this, I applied subsurface scattering to the icing of my donut. This made the lighting appear much softer and gave the donut a more colourful, realistic tone. We can see what the shadows looked like before and after this feature was implemented below:

I also applied it to my sprinkles! This made the lighting more coherent overall and looks AMAZING.

I’m amazed at how much better everything looks with the proper lighting implemented. I have linked the video I used for this part of the tutorial below, which is once again made by Blender Guru.

Today I was able to add long sprinkles to my Blender donut! Once again, this was not a simple a task as it seemed it would be. I started by creating a cylinder mesh, which is pretty standard by now as it’s just hitting Shift+A and selecting the option in a drop-down menu, but I then learned how to bevel it to remove the unrealistic, sharper edges. Selecting the top and bottom faces in Edit Mode, I hit Ctrl+B to round out the edges of my sprinkle. I then duplicated it (Shift+D) three times to create a shorter one, a longer one, and a curved one. The curved one was a bit more complicated as I had to add a deform modifier to the cylinder and bend it to the degree I wanted. In this process, I also learned how to move the origin point of each object to their centre (which makes the object rotate around it’s centre rather than above or below it, which Blender Guru says is basically the shape’s “centre of mass”). Below, I’ve included a picture of my sprinkles before being added to my donut!

Actually applying the long sprinkles to the donut was an… interesting process. I’ve documented my progress below with screenshots to show you each state of the sprinkles on the donut, which I found kind of entertaining.

After adding a node allowing for randomized rotation, I made the sprinkles slightly bigger and ensured the minimum distance from each one was also slightly bigger due to this size increase. Finally, I ended up with this:

Below is the linked video that I used for this part of the tutorial!

Today, I added sprinkles to my donut. This sounds like it would be a relatively simple procure, but the process to get there included quite a number of steps. This involved using geometry nodes, similar to the nodes used for textures, but designed for altering geometry and 3D forms instead. Using a scatter feature, I was able to create a simple sphere and “scatter” it along the surface of the icing. I was able to alter the size of the sprinkles, the amount of them, and the distance they sit apart from each other for as little clipping as possible. While this sounds all well and good, the sprinkles were scattered along every surface of the icing rather than just the top. This included the “drippy” parts and the underside of the icing as well.

Using a feature called weight paint, I was able to paint on my icing where I wanted the sprinkles to appear. I was then able to further limit the amount on the donut. Following this, I scaled the donut down in size as it was currently about 1.5m long. That is far too large for a donut, and while the size wouldn’t seem to matter when making just a single donut, it is good practice to keep things at an easy-to-reference uniform scale when 3D modelling for when other materials and forms are added to a scene.

While this is a shorter update, there is more to come as next time I learn how to put cylindrical sprinkles on my donut! Below I have attached a picture of my process and Blender Guru’s tutorial that I followed for this step of my Blender journey.

Today I was able to colour my donut and modify the textures and lighting to something a bit more realistic. I followed the next part in Blender Guru’s tutorial series to do this.

I learned a lot about texture today, and how texture typically works in 3D modelling. For the countertop that would hold my donut, I downloaded a texture from a 3D modelling reference website called Poliigon. This site was designed by Blender Guru and is a massive library for textures, models, and other 3D modelling assets. The resources here are available for use by 3D artists and animators and they are designed to match the industry standard. Many resources here are locked behind a paywall but there is a fairly massive free library available for use. While textures can be found on Google Images and other websites, they are usually consolidated into a single image. The textures available on Poliigon have multiple layers that are more designed for 3D modelling than flat images, which are typically used for 2D art and websites. Below, I’ll go into some detail about the texture I downloaded.

The texture I downloaded as part of the tutorial, for my countertop, was called “Denali Polished Quartzite Stone Texture, Gray” which downloaded as a .zip file and came with 5 layers.

From left to right, the layers are as follows: Base colour (main texture), displacement, metallic sheen, bump map, and roughness. All of these textures, while all five don’t particularly need to be used at the same time, combine to make a marble countertop texture that properly reflects light and has subtle chips, dents, scratches, and fingerprints on its surface.

If I wanted to modify any of my texture, such as roughness or lighting, I can use the texture nodes available in the shading window.

I also learned how to make my own textures by adding a material to what I want to texture and then hitting “new” instead of “open” which would allow me to import a downloaded texture. In a new window, I selected a brush type and could draw directly on the donut. I drew the lighter line that would go across the centre of the donut (from when it bakes in real life and is not as dark as the top and bottom of it). Below is my created texture and the final result of the day’s progress.

I’ll also link the video tutorial I used in these stages for reference.