Fruit Cake with Orange Glaze

This project is a 3D rendition of Milena Vasyukova’s Kitchen interior concept done by me and Ashna Choudhury. My work shading the set is still a work in progress, but for my reel I focused on shading the cake during Jan-Feb 2021. I was responsible all shading, texturing, and lighting in the closeup renders below. All the models were done by Ashna.

This project was interesting to me because of the central piece: the cake. I’ve always wanted to make some tasty looking fruits, and the grapes and orange slices on this cake. Moreover, I love the contrast of the cake’s orange colors to the green of the kitchen walls. In this project, I wanted to practice matching the textures and colors that the concept artist chose. This is in contrast to my Mouse Bar project, in which I created whatever textures and materials I sought best for the different items in the set. Instead of putting my own spin on the set’s materials, I try to translate Milena’s take on the kitchen into 3D.

Programs: Maya, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Renderman 23.

Cake Progress

I began the shading process by working on all the fruits first. Creating the fruits was surprisingly simple! I already had a pretty beautiful cherry material from when I created my chocolate cake project. I created the orange slices by starting with an orange slice photo to create base color and roughness values. Using Substance Painter, I painted in height details of the orange flesh. Lastly, I found a whole host of guides to creating grape shaders. The grapes were the trickiest for me to nail down, as they looked quite marble-y until I adjusted the values of the surface imperfections roughness map I used.

The orange icing glaze posed an interesting challenge. The frosting model, based on the concept art, was heavily stylized - much thicker than actual glaze in real life. I began by trying to modify glass and subsurface parameters on the glaze to get a transparent, orange-y look. While this looked nice on its own, being able to see through the glaze and see the cake layers at the top made no sense! The model is too thick for all the light to pass through. So, I tried a new approach in which I only allow the glaze drips to have transparency. This struck a nice balance of looking like the concept art, yet also looking realistic.

Finally, I shaded the plate using Substance Painter. Initially I tried using only the blue color depicted in Milena’s concept art. However, the precise shade of turquoise stood out too much against the simple framing I used for the cake. So, for my renders, I incorporated brown tones on the edges of the plate to ground the plate in the scene. For future renders of the kitchen set, though, I will be playing around more with using whites on the plate instead!

Set Progress - still in the works!

References

To make the cake Ashna and I needed to figure out what type of cake is painted in the concept. After consulting some baking friends, we decided on a chiffon cake topped with an orange icing glaze.