Hell Cake is a 3D project for a bronze trophy depicting a melted chocolate cake in the shape of a war-ravaged building, crowned by an angel of perversion.
An award intended for those who play with the fate of the world, tainting it with their own desires and obsessions while celebrating their birthdays in lavish luxury.
Created from a concept developed in collaboration with The Unsafe House, a multidisciplinary art collective based in Amsterdam, and subsequently developed and completed independently.
The main technical challenge of this project was making the sculpture appear as a single continuous object rather than a collection of separate pieces. I wanted every element to blend into the others, with a more or less smooth transitions at every point of contact.
The most straightforward solution would have been to merge everything into a single high-resolution mesh. However, this would have resulted in an excessively dense model, making both rendering and viewport performance impractical.
Instead, I individually quad-remeshed each component to an optimized polygon count that preserved clean shading. I then used a Geometry Nodes setup based on Geometry Proximity, Sample Nearest Surface, and Set Mesh Normal to make them appear continuous.
This setup creates the illusion that adjacent meshes are fused together. Although the geometry remains separate, the modified normals produce the appearance of a continuous sculpted form.
The Geometry Nodes setup can be seen in one of the images below. I have also included a link to the YouTube video where I first learned this technique.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCQAwDyDO0o&t=7s
Geometry Nodes ON/OFF comparison
