Christmas baking with MissKate

Fair warning: this will be one of the retrospective blog posts. I wanted to make sure that I finished the scene on time, so I postponed the writing part until I was reasonably sure that I won't be doing any "last-last" minute changes. I have now got to the point where I dare not touch it (for fear of ruining it completely) so it should be safe to look back on the process of creating it.

Only I don't know where to start. Many things happened in the 9 days I was working on it. And some of them didn't even make it into the final render. For instance, I made several notes about the issues I encountered when creating the lace table cloth. "What lace table cloth?" you might ask—and it would be an entirely valid question. The short answer is: it is one of several things I created that made no sense in the scene. No-one who has ever baked Christmas cookies would put a baking tray on a festive lace cloth.

So what am I going to write about to make this post informative but (relatively) brief? The main focus of the render is the gingerbread, which makes it an ideal candidate. I might also mention the other biscuits (although I'm not sure what they are called in English) because they created some unique issues for me. And I'll probably skip the stuff you've heard me (read me?) say many times before.

Right. Gingerbread. The shapes started simple enough. I found reference pictures, used curves to create the 2D shapes, converted them to mesh, extruded them, nothing too fancy. What surprised me was that I didn't have any issues with the curves. I hadn't worked with them much before, as I always saw them as unpredictable and clumsy to use. And there I was, pulling the handles around as if I knew what I was doing. Huh. 

 

With the shapes set up, it was time to come up with a decent material. Nowadays, great textures are just a few clicks away, but food is still a bit of a problem. (Along with non-plant organic stuff in general.) So I did what I always do in this situation: I searched for a tutorial. And, surprisingly enough, I found one posted by Sardi Pax. It is a bit on the old-ish side, but it pushed me in the right direction.

I tried to combine the best parts of texture and procedural worlds. For the basic material I chose a paper texture (I was mainly after the color, gloss and reflection maps). Then I used a noise texture to create the grainy look—and to add little bumps on the surface. Not the general displacement, though. For that I used the color map because I wanted it to be a lot smoother, to simulate the way dough rises when you bake it (the noise texture was creating little spikes instead). As a finishing touch I mixed in another noise texture, this time to add a subtle effect of uneven baking. The final result looks like this:

I was quite pleased with how the cookies turned out, but I dreaded the frosting part. The way I saw it, I had two options: one, to find great vector graphics, learn to work with them and adjust them to suit my needs. Likelihood: somewhere between a zombie outbreak and a meteor hitting my house. Option two: painstakingly create every curve, line and dot manually with the bezier curves. Well, the good news is that my house is still standing...

But I make it sound worse than it was. In reality it was a lot of fun coming up with the shapes. At times it felt like I was holding the piping bag in hand, decorating the biscuits for real. As for the material, I couldn't think of anything better than a plain combination of diffuse and glossy. I suspect real frosting is much more complicated than that, but I'm clinging to the hope that it will fool you sufficiently enough.

The last thing I want to talk about before I wrap this up are the other biscuits. I was able to reuse a lot from the gingerbread (the material textures, the grain and bake marks), but I wanted to cover the biscuits with flour. Now, that doesn't sound like a serious problem. In theory. I will download imperfections overlays and use them for displacement. A bit of digging around in the node editor and I should be fine.

Well... After a LOT of digging I got something that remotely looked like what I was after, but I'm not convinced that this is the best way of doing this. Right at the end of the project, when I was adding scratches to the plate, I found out that imperfections can be used in 'Normals' sockets as well. And this might be my answer for the next projects. Only in this case, I would have to somehow combine multiple normal maps, and they would have to affect distinct parts of the material... well, I'll figure it out eventually.

Before I do, though, you can have a look at the turbulent scene progression (the changes included resolution, so some of the images ended up being cropped or scaled up):

And now it is really all for this week. As for the next one, I haven't decided on a topic yet. I might wait and see what the CG Challenge is, or I'll go and work on one of the CG Cookie tutorials. I have been thinking about the animation courses lately, so it's entirely possible that next time you'll see my first clumsy attempts at bringing pictures to life.