I am struggling with donut texturing

Hey everyone or anyone!
can any body help as I am new to blender…I am struggling with the famous Blender Donut tutorial from blender Guru but I am suffering to make the dough look realistic just like Andrew Price mine looks a bit plastic like/cartoonish/rock like and as far as I can tell I have done everything right and I have tried it 3 to 4 times but I am no way able to achieve the look I think that is maybe because he is using older version as it is 2 years old and mine is 2.93.1 so please help.
Here are screenshots of nodes and result



That is the result of Andrew Price’s result his looks better halfway than mine

link to the tutorial

Here is my project file

First off, welcome to the community, @AhmadKhan! I have to say that yours looks pretty great! I think yours looks tastier than Andrews, but the plastic/flatness I think is more of an issue with the lighting than the shading. His donut has a little more interest because you can see the transition from light to dark which sells both the texture and the subsurface scattering. Before making big changes to your shading, try moving your light around a bit/making it smaller.

Let us know how it goes!

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This is what I’m thinking. His donut looks more like a real fried donut. Blender Guru’s is more cakey in comparison.

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Thank you I feel so good to be in such a responsive and encouraging community.haahahahahah that just made my day… thank you so much for such kind words and thank you again for your feedback I will definitely try moving my light! Much appreciated :slight_smile:
Will update you how it went.
btw do you think I should be that much concerned about photorealism in the beginning or should I just first get familiar with the interface and then master these things?

hahahahah thank you so much! Well okay then now I am donut expert from now on:)

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You are the donut king!

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okay then now I am…man thank you so much… you guys are love

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Just saw this quip. I’d recommend starting out more simply, learning the basics before moving onto more photorealistic modeling. Don’t start out trying to model the Sistine Chapel. Going full tilt like that, you’re more likely to get overwhelmed, and burn yourself out.

Start out with low poly styling. It lets you come to terms with topology and basic material work, and making something that looks fairly cool looking during your newbie days is a nice little boost to your modeling self esteem. Once you get a good handle on that, then you can move on to more complex projects.

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Well, the short version of this conversation is that if you focus on mirroring the settings of other artists, you may achieve photorealism beyond the level of your actual experience, but it is learning interface and technique and workflow and settings that will ultimately allow you to make whatever you want to whatever level of realism you want.

The practice and experience is what is most important, but as you follow along in tutorials, please take time to learn the why. Pause the video. Try a different setting other than what was suggested by Andrew. See what changing the sliders to high and low extremes does. Read the manual page for the specific node you’re working with.

Just my two cents. :slight_smile:

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okay I will then follow your advice and I so wanna make Sistine Chapel like stuff u know like creating car chase sequence with explosions and stuff but I hv held my horses and now a days I am doing these tutorials again and again to have it by heart and it is helping alot and doing the same tutorial 2nd time gives you more insight about why is he doing this step… but u know as every newbie I am also ambitious so your advice helps a lot. Thank you so much

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To me these two cents are gold coins… Yes you are right I will do that and I didn’t know that there is manual page also so now I will focus on the why part and once again thank you guys so much for taking the time out to help me… :hearts:
Will post my work soon here

You can still do that, just don’t expect to make something worthy of The Fast and the Furious right away. Don’t be afraid to get cheesy. Make some little block cars with octogonal wheels driving around on a little road. It won’t win you any awards, but it’ll give you a basic understanding of what you need to do to make something that looks a little cooler next time.

Think of it as being an iterative process. When I started out, I went into it expecting to CREATE WORLDS OF ABSOLUTE MAJESTY THE LIKES OF WHICH NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN, and, well, I ended up falling far short of that. I’d get burnt out, drop it for a year or so, pick it up again with the same expectations, get burnt out again, rinse and repeat. It wasn’t until I started doing things in more managable chunks that I started truly improving. Instead of creating grand vistas that wouldn’t look out of place in a Lord of the Rings movie, I found a shot of a little low poly house I liked, copied it, added my own touches to it, then moved on to a slightly more complicated scene.

Now here I am, comfortably intermediate, and getting better all the while.

And what Hunkadoodle said is very much true: following tutorials will only get you so far. They’ll tell you how to do something, but that deeper level, the why of something, that is best found through tons and tons of goofing around, experimenting with your various tools, nodes, and settings to see what you can produce.

Though in the end, what worked for me may not be the best process for you. The best thing to do is just to go at it, do what seems most fun to you, and not give up.

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First thank you so much for taking the time out to give such a wonderful advice :hearts:
Well I am a filmmaker and hv been doing it for past 8 years and I have failed at it so many times that I can’t even count I first struggled with Photoshop then with color grading and then with AE and after dumping Photoshop for years cause I was too ambitious (which I am even today :sweat_smile:) and wasn’t realistic cause I was comparing myself with experts so I came in blender I came with the expectation that I am going to fail but if I hang in there I will get good at it. It’s like one step at a time and now I have dropped my expectations and now when I see results they are beyond my expectations I get more enthusiastic and if I get stuck at some point I ask around and if I don’t get answers then I just move on believing that it will come by one day that is bcz maybe I am not that experienced yet… sometimes yes u get discouraged but then folks like u guys help pick me up again and keep moving and as you have said just hang in there and Do Not Give up so that’s what I am doing.

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well that is how it is looking right now after changing direction of light and making it a bit more harsh and I am quite happy with the result.

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