Ever eaten donuts for breakfast?
A few more shots for fun:
Created with Blender 2.60 and rendered with Cycles.
I created this for my Cycles tutorial. I wanted to choose a topic that would demonstrate the capabilities of the new render engine. And somehow I landed on donuts.
Watch the tutorial:
http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/introduction-to-cycles
mmmmmm those are some yummy looking donuts Mr Price
Neat! I love the one with all the sprinkles on the plate!
Nice Cycle intro tutorial. Thanks.
This was supposed to be Sun lighting in the morning? Really looks like a lamp turned on at night.
I would have used HDR, behind the window.
And, you should have closed your room, because the reflection reflects blackness…
“I’ll take a dozen, please …”
I respectfully disagree. In any photograph (computer-generated or on film) you have to strictly control the light. You have to control where the viewer’s eyes are going to go first, and you have to prepare a roughly circular path through the image that leads back to the starting point. Extraneous light, even if “realistic” or “accurate,” nevertheless must be controlled.
In a studio “bench shot” like this one, for example, the whole setup is actually occurring on a table, and the entire lighting is fake. There’s a solid black cloth hanging behind the set and the lens is poking through it, with the photographer (these days) either looking through a video viewfinder or standing to one side; maybe peeking through an opening beside the camera to set up the shot, then closing it again to shoot.
A good render, I think, has to be “a good photograph, first.” A good, pleasing, well-lit and well-balanced composition that looks good in print, or on (uncalibrated) video monitors, or wherever else it’s going to be exhibited.
The very nice thing about Cycles, as this tutorial illustrates, is that … this is how a real studio photographer does it. The “plane” is a photographic tool called a softbox.
However… If you think you’re going to get away with just a “10-second” building-donuts tutorial … think again! 
Well HDR is still good idea if used gently for ambient ( even in photography some of light still comes from surrounding).
Think that cream and little things on it are too smooth, maybe a bit of noise displacement or something similar…
Love FC-ing Andrew (take it back you ridged swine :D).
Can’t wait to watch tut!
In a studio “bench shot” like this one,
That’s exactly it, it looks like it was shot in a studio, and the goal was to make it look like it was shot in the morning, with a light comming through a window.
Do they sell donuts at Mr Price then?
that’s news to me.
And, to that end, I remember watching a group of photographers setting up an absolutely gorgeous shot of a hotel lobby, with warm light streaming through the windows and so on … and the shot was done at 2:00 AM on a new-moon night. Nothing of that “totally realistic” photograph was actually the natural light that it appeared to be.
Why was it done this way? Because there would have been no point in the actual daytime when that lighting could have actually been achieved.
I’m most fond of the classic photographs of O. Winston Link, who photographed steam locomotives using flashbulbs. He made a very precise science of it (and he wrote textbooks on the subject). The results were so good that one admirer, noticing the lamp in Birmingham Special Gets the Highball at Rural Retreat, commented at how “lucky” he was that the light “just happened” to be there. But it was all contrived. Even “the little boy holding the lantern as the great train rushes by” was artfully concealing a flashbulb of a carefully pre-calculated size. The light inside the trackside shack, in the photo that features the sign “WATER,” was likewise precisely computed.
Yer wot?!
I’ll have a pint of what he’s having.
To me the lighting looks great. It’s Cycles so I’m not even sure whether HDR is useable. Irrespective of that, I’m sitting in a pub in North London as I needed to use the free WiFi to send an e-mail and some people here don’t believe that these are not photos.
Great looking donuts, Andrew, and thanks a lot for the tutorial!
Cheers! 
And, to that end, I remember watching a group of photographers setting up an absolutely gorgeous shot of a hotel lobby, with warm light streaming through the windows and so on … and the shot was done at 2:00 AM on a new-moon night. Nothing of that “totally realistic” photograph was actually the natural light that it appeared to be.
That is far from what Andrew has achieved here. It just looks like a desk lamp over the doughnuts… I just say what I see, can’t help it.
I’ll have a pint of what he’s having.
No. It’s mine 
It’s Cycles so I’m not even sure whether HDR is useable.
.hdr environment rendering is officially supported in Cycles.
so is cycles out yet?
Hey that was a cool tutorial. I enjoyed the cheery, breezy, covering the basics tone of it, just what I needed to see about Cycles. I must add Andrew’s work has come a long way since the early days… His pacing and delivery is unmatched by any other tutorial author I’ve come across, I guess it helps being Australian! 
Seriously, very impressive. Thank you!
great tutorial, helped me.
Can I download it?
so is cycles out yet?
Officially? no.
But you can test it by downloading a build at www.graphicall.org
Nice little food-production shot. However, it seems that the frosting is missing just a little something. Maybe a tiny bit more mirror/gloss.
Awesomeness!!! I love it!!! :DDDD
A brilliant result - and as a photographer myself I can say this is a well-lit studio shot.
Good tutorial too - but I DO wish that Andrew would take the time to learn the difference between “number” and “amount”. Amount of people? What, are they being sprinkled onto the cornflakes that could go with these doughnuts?!
(then again, it bugs me that Blender itself has this mistake, e.g: “Amount of particles” being one huge clanger)
