I haven’t seen many desserts in the forum lately so I conjured this piece of homemade butter cream iced chocolate cake.
Top looks good but the sides need work. They definitely look artificial as compared to the top frosting. Tonight I’m having pecan pie so I’m happy you made this to remind me 
the lighting, colors, are all really good, but the texture of the cake looks like … sorry I don’t know the name… that thing that is used to close wine bottles.
Change the texture and it will be great.
nice but it needs more of a swishy texture for the icing. maybe using the ‘warp’ feature combinig like clouds and a distorted noise textures. also another idea is you could make a duplicate mesh, grab some vertices and rotate them using proportional editing, and set the original to ‘tex mesh’ and type in the name of the distorted mesh ( not the object but the mesh ) into the texmesh field of the original.
I changed the texture by decreasing the contrast on the BumpMap. I had the NOR as low as possible on the first picture, same with this one too. Unlike my other projects, this bumpmap was on huge gigantic image, and not a seamless tile.
Anyhow, thanks for the crits everyone.
I’ll save this project, the text can be easily changed to make a custom birthday card for anyone.
Desoto My UVmap was not proportional. I used the same image scale but on different scaled sections of the cake. I fixed that.
Falk I believe that you are looking for the word “cork”. And you never saw one of my wife’s homemade cakes? 
Modron What did you say? 
Duh… you lost me after the “warp” feature. I don’t even know what that is. But it all sounds like a good idea.
i tried it out and it works perfect. here’s what you do:
…first, make sure the cake is pretty dense poly-wise.
…now give the cake a distorted noise texture set to ‘nor’ instead of ‘col’.
…duplicate the cake and with the O key, toggle into proportional edit mode, and select a vertice and rotate the vertice. this will twist the nearby vertices giving it a swishy quality. now go all over the cake repeating this, so your whole cake is full of swishy vortex like regions.
…then, again for the duplicate, go into edit buttons and in the mesh field, not the object field, change the name to ‘cake’.
…now select the original, and in the edit buttons, you’ll see a blank field that says ‘texmesh’ nearby it. in that field, type ‘cake’. take a render, and if the swirling is too harsh, go back to the duplicate, and smooth it a couple of times.
…and that should about do it. if you want i can post a blend.
I think this post should be locked, its far too high in calories 
Some of us are trying to diet you know
Ken
Modron Hey It worked! Thanks, but I think that I’ll do another different project and use that effect possibly. The high poly and the procedural textures really made that rendering time VERY SLOOOOW (that was in just preview size).
I think it looks nice apart from the brown dough it seem like clay (no offence) but the texture and other parts look great.
Here’s the icing texture that I used It is (GREEN PAINT!)…
http://www.mayang.com/textures/Metal/images/Flat%20Metal%20Textures/metal_C221704.JPG
Here’s the website for more in that catagory…
http://www.mayang.com/textures/Metal/html/Flat%20Metal%20Textures/index.html
The main site here…
http://www.imageafter.com/textures.php
happy birthday!!
haha, it is nice to see that someone would model a cake just because the finished projects didnt have enough “sweet” 3d models. how thoughtfull, haha.
great realistic modeling, i think the sunlight burn on the table looks very photo real. nice work.
mmm mmm good eatin
I do agree with the fact the sides of the cake needed a bit of tweaking in the first renders…though I found the top almost perfect!!!
Glad you reworked it…now it looks way cool…!!!
Keep up the good work.
The icing is too perfect and too symmetrical. You need randomness in order to achieve more realism. The AO is really giving some bad grainy results on the plate and some shadows. The cake texture is too flat as well. Real cakes usually have larger folds and bumps. The work is almost there. Keep it up.
I did update the cake, but nevet posted it.
Here’s a Full throttled, full setting, YafRay rendering with the highest settings possible.
Unfortunately, after 3 hours, I had to stop the rendering, but here it is so far. I really like the lighting. I know, it is very bright outside, but real photographs do that too. I also like the benefits of FULL YAFRAY, look at the light on the walls form the curtains and window sill. The white icing has a better ambient glow and creamy look.
wow, the partial render looks great
This is most likely the final rendering
of this project. This project was intended
to learn a little about YafRay lighting
settings, not something to “churn out”
for another notch in my belt. I learned
a lot from it.
OOPS! The Cache was ON, in the picture on the right… (Cache = Yes)
Of course we like the one on the left
much better, but there is definately a
need to tone down the light sources
for the full rendering.
I like how the light bounces better and
more realistically, when the full rendering
is used. The color seems richer too.
One more thing, nobody caught that
the landsacpe outside is a little crooked.
It is not level for the angle that it is viewd from.
It needs to be rotated counter-clockwise
a few degrees. The camera distortion
sort of masks that at first look.