I started learning Blender in the summer of '22. Here is a work-in-progress for a procedural fruit shader I started working in the fall of '22 before taking a 9+ month break from Blender and then picking it up again recently in the fall of '23.
When I opened the file I realized these still needed a bit of work so I set the versions back to “0.01” as a sort of starting point. I’ll be making updates periodically. The lighting is intentionally unforgiving. And I think the pears were the last thing I was working on before I put this file to rest… so they are less refined than some of the other fruit.
These are all based on roughly the same node setup… which is why I say “shader(s)”. And they all use the same mesh which is distorted using shapekeys… but I made a mistake using a quad sphere as a basis and this will eventually need to be remedied. The issue is that the geometry tends to be “squarish” in some places (ie. notice the tops near the stem are squarish in some instances?)
Oh, and the stems are still editable curves.
When I started this shader last fall it was just another exercise to familiarize myself with Blender and working with nodes.
Most of these variations were created using actual reference which I ate afterwards. But a couple were created using images from the Google since the fruit wasn’t available locally.
My history in 3D is mainly with modeling. So exploring materials is new to me, but I find the process kind of relaxing… but it’s easy to lose a lot of time to tweaking.
My node tree is crazy because I started this before I really knew Blender or was familiar with working with nodes. But I’ll hopefully clean it up at some point and maybe share it. Not sure.
That said, I know Ryan King has a procedural apple shader tutorial. It wasn’t available when I started my project, but from a quick glance, it looks like the same concept… you just start with a base material and then add layer upon layer of details to it using the mix RGB node. First the primary color(s), then all the supplementary features.
Although it appears I have some ripening gradients and whatnot going on as well. But it’s all about blending and revealing layers.
It appears Nik Kottmann has an older video as well (which came up when I searched for Ryan’s). I’m not sure about his technique, but the results look decent!
Thanks! The fruit has a displacement modifier with a cloud shader set to global. In many cases setting things this way isn’t desirable… but in this case, it means that no two pieces of fruit are ever the same shape because they are deformed (slightly) whenever they are moved in 3D space.
All the fruit shares the same mesh, but each type of fruit has a very specific base shape that conforms to that type of fruit. The displacement modifier only makes those base shapes slightly irregular so they don’t look like clones of each other.
