Sweet stuff (throwing some food at Vray)

A long time ago, I did a bunch of food renders in Indigo.
Until recently, it would have been hard to do anything similar in Vray because of the materials limitations. But given the progress Andrey’s made on his exporter lately, including (crucially) support for SSS, I decided to do another food piece, this time specifically built with Vray in mind. Here are two images plus some close-up details from the high-res versions.
Hope you like them. Comments, criticism, insult and injury very much welcome.

http://www.bertrand-benoit.com/images/Composite1.jpg

http://www.bertrand-benoit.com/images/Composite2.jpg

Very tasty!5*

Generally spectacular, and miles away from anything I’m yet able to achieve.
A couple things that stand out to me just for the sake of it:

-The grapes look like glass beads, maybe SSS and/or some trans will help.

-The cake looks awesome but the white icing feels more like cloth to me, can’t really put my finger on why maybe it needs more spec to look moist.

-The crema on the coffee is almost awesome. It could be that dark for turkish coffe be it seems a bit to fat and rounded.

Not to be taken as crits so much as impressions. Really excellent work.

That pie crust is absolutely phenomenal, and the chocolate swirls look delicious.:yes: The grapes, though, need some imperfection. Right now, they look just solid light green, like fake wax grapes.

Wow… That’s nothing short of incredible. You’ve got too much skill lol.

I love these. The pie render is fantastic.

That is so awesome. It looks very real and way beyond my abilities by a lightyears.

At first, being a cook and totally believing the image was real, I thought the cake just had powdered sugar sprinkled on it and the chocolate frosting added on top of that for decoration. The texture isn’t as smooth as frosting or something. It wasn’t till after reading the comments that I went back to look at it again and saw that it was frosted. It’s such a little thing though. This image makes me hungry.

Now here’s something a bit different from you.

You did an amazing job, how did you do the pie crust like so many are asking?

wow!!! would you look at that pie crust it’s just awesome great work BbB

That is just… I don’t have words for it. :stuck_out_tongue:

However, the cream on the coffee looks a little like dog sh**. Sorry, but i really think it does.

Good god that looks spectacularly realistic and delicious. Even the pastry looks bumpy like real pastry. I would have happily guessed that these were photographs had they not been posted in these forums.

i

… it’s

holy fuck you are talented

great rendering

Thanks for the kind feedback guys,

Reacting to your comments in no particular order:

Yes, the grapes are not completely satisfactory. They’re solid green because the exporter doesn’t allow for textured SSS right now. They do have an exponent map, though, wich makes their shyniness vary. I could have rendered two images (solid green with SSS; textured, imperfect green without SSS) and composited the two in post.

The strangely dark coffee is not coffee but chocolate mousse in espresso cups. Perhaps I should have made this clearer in my intro.

The recipe for the chocolate pie is as follows: for the crust, I used only a solid colour (no diffuse texture) with SSS and displacement (using a tweaked plaster-wall texture). For the chocolate: diffuse chocolate texture, no SSS, no displacement but a high-res sculpt for the swirly motion.

Otherwise, lots of SSS, lots of displacement and lots of relatively high specularity for the general moisture.

Delicious!

Glad i’m not the only one, lol.

The rest of this is just full of wow.

I remember the Indigo version, this one is even better, really nice result. Too bad SSS still does not support textures for the grappes. Reagarding the chocolate mousse, IMO the shader is ok, maybe a litle bit more flat, any way it seems ok for me. with such huge use of displacement and SSS, did you still get acceptable response times ? Are you using an HDRI map for illumination ? Also, in your other renderings and it seems here too, you added some chromatic aberration, I got some results with the lens deformation in the Blender compositor, did you used that function ?

It looks freekin real… Awesome work.

That is a really great render. How did you do the porous part of the cake? Is it just an image or did you use some other trickery?

Tak: Thx man. All the doughs, crusts, etc. use displacement to create the irregularities. The chocolate pie’s crust also uses SSS (and one solid colour in the diffuse slot).

Enrico: Hi Enrico. Terrence was asking the same thing recently. There are a zillion ways to produce CA, one of which is the Blender compositor (lens distort node). I use it quite a lot, though I prefer the more subtle effect you can get in Photoshop using either the built-in lens correction filter, or various plugins, including Tiffen DFX and Richard Rosenman’s DOF PRO (which now has CA in addition to DOF in its settings).
Despite the displacement, render times were completely OK. It’s hard for me to understand when Vray begins to struggle with displacement. Sometimes it does, sometimes it’s fine. Make sure you raise the dynamic memory (in system tab) from 500 to something in line with your available RAM) - I raise it to 2000 for 4Gigs of RAM.
And yes, I used the kitchen HDRI, but mainly for reflections. I have rectangle lights for illumination.