The difficult thing has been to get the colours to work. In the reference image they range from almost white to pure yellow and similarly the shadows take on a reddish tone on the underside.
(I am aware that the modelling and UV mapping is very sketchy right now but I am confident I can improve this
I’d be really interested to receive any hints about how to get a better result
Want to thank everyone who has helped me with my lemon skin problem.
I started using Blender for architectural rendering. The fruit stuff is something of a spare-time pursuit.
What’s great about blender is that really powerful results are possible but they’re hard to find by ‘blundering around’. You have to understand what you’re doing.
Dave Wilson
This whole interest in fruit/still life etc is inspired by some of the Spanish artists from the 17th century - Zurbaran in particular. Here is a detail from one of his paintings:
It’s hardly photo-realistic but has a fantastic, luminous quality.
I’m not quite sure where my own work is going just yet. I somehow imagine trying to make things as realistic as I can and then ‘backing-off’ a little. Maybe somehow acknowledging the still-life tradition without trying to copy it slavishly.
Other interesting elements of these paintings (besides baskets of fruit etc.) are bottles and decanters or water (or wine), drapery, flowers, dead fish, lobsters, game etc.
Anyway - there’s someway to go before that.
Isn’t Blender fantastic! I have enormous respect for the developers.
Here’s my best shot. I started with a polysphere (a subdivided cube shrinkwrapped around a uv sphere) You can add these using the ‘extra objects’ add on. This gives perfectly even mesh density and makes for a cube style unwrap, so the displacement will be uniform and there is no pinching as there would be on a uv sphere. The pores are created using a tileable displacement map I painted by hand (in photoshop) using a real lemon as a guide. On top of that is more procedural displacment for random lumps. The lemon is sculpted using multires at the tips. The material is mostly SSS and glossy, using the displacement map again to mix the glossy. The inset pores have slightly less gloss than the bulging, smoother areas. There is also very fine bump added in the nodes. If anyone wants to see the blend, I can post it.
This is amazing. Advice about the mesh is great - but it’s going to take me days to absorb the advice I’ve been getting (from you and others) about the materials.
Love the fact that you picked up that there are lumps AND pores - though, if I might be slightly critical, it looks like your lumps and pores are not aligned. Looking carefully at a real lemon skin makes me realise that it is not all that different from animal skin. The lumps are like the skin cells and the pores are like hair follicles (one per cell)
I’d really appreciate seeing the blend file. This is all 100% new knowledge as far as I’m concerned. Massive respect for the people who’ve responded to this post. It has been immensely encouraging.
I would be interested to know approximately how long it took you develop your lemon skin and whether this was a new problem or one you were already familiar with.
Looks pretty good midnight, but you can clearly see the pinching at the uv poles.
@omninorous. Now that I look at it again, it looks too glossy. Oh well you can experiment with the nodes. I spent about 3 hours fiddling with this. half hour to paint the disp map, half hour modeling, half hour with modifers, hour with the nodes, half hour lighting.
I think if someon spent a couple hours tweaking it you could get it looking pretty real. If someone wants to mess to with it and you make it look better than my render in post 17, post your render and a link to the packed blend, perhaps together we can create the ultimate lemon!
