Introducing the LASER CHEF Easy Glide, bringing the exciting world of food and drink replication to the home with an easy-to-use, low-power, roll-away appliance that fits any lifestyle.
Taking my “Future of the Late 20th Century” kick back to the 1970s, this is my take on a kitchen food replicator a la Star Trek, but with a heavy dollop of '70s kitchen earth-tones, Atari-style cartridges, and chunky neon indicator lamps (which I have to mention because I was having an absolute bear of a time making that reflector texture).
This one is a bit older, with a worse turkey glow, but it’s the angle from the mockup.
Most everything came out satisfactorily on this one, save for maybe the materializing turkey. I went with a volume-shading approach, but I just don’t think there’s enough control over it to get what I need out of it-- the main problem being that I couldn’t find a good way to fade back the volume away from the shape-- it was either hard edges and all or a spherical gradient approximation. I think I need to get some particles in there, or maybe just some speckled planes to fake it, for that transporter-style glow.
Late Edit: I managed to make the turkey materialization a bit more interesting with the addition of another light to really light up the chamber, there. It’s better, but I’m still not 100% satisfied. I could probably do more with volumetrics, but I’m at the point of cutting this one loose and moving on. (The ad copy also got a bit of tweaking, as well.)
Colophon
- All final models and textures were my own, except…
- …the model of the turkey (which I did not do justice to) was by LuxXeon on DeviantArt, from https://www.deviantart.com/luxxeon/art/Free-3D-Model-Roasted-Turkey-496812050
- Photos used (…and did you know how hard it is to find royalty-free stock imagery of food that doesn’t look contemporary?):
- Turkey Dinner by Comstock Images: https://www.freeimages.com/photo/roast-turkey-with-cranberry-sauce-and-green-beans-1931235
- Holiday Cookies by Petr Kratochvil: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=29616
- Spaghetti Bolognese Detail by Petr Kratochvil: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=10678
- Forest Fruit by Petr Kratochvil: https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=3425
- Fonts used:
- Bodoni MT Condensed (Monotype) - LASER CHEF logo
- SH Ad Grotesk (Mannesmann Scangraphic) - Sans-serif details on the model (numbers, labels)
- Kabel (ITC) - Headline and headings on the advertisement mockup
- Goudy Sans BT (ITC) - Body text on the advertisement mockup
- Software used
- Blender 3.4 (natch) for all modeling and material application
- Affinity Designer 2 for vector graphics
- InDesign and Photoshop for creating out and roughing up the advertisement mockup
