I’m currently putting together a little birthday cake for my nephew who turns one next month. I want to do something for him that he can look back and see in years to come. My theme is just a simple dinosaur cake with everything made that could be feasible to be made into a real cake (tempted to maybe have it made one day - as I can’t bake!)
So far I have a lot of icing/marzipan features… I also wanted to attempt a chocolate brownie volcano at the top with caramel lava - but I couldn’t quite make it work. Iinstead I’m thinking of sculpting a basic t-rex skull on the top for the lava to flow from and add some bones to the base of the cake.
If I get time I would also like to do a simple animation of the dinosaurs dancing.
Where I’m strugging - is probably how to make the area around the cake interesting, and maybe where I should put “Happy Birthday” and “Finlay”.
This is really cute, I love your dinosaurs! I think you could make a children’s book with these graphics The marzipan looks super accurate as well. I honestly really like the area around the cake, it’s simple and draws your attention to the cake. I would personally leave the background as is.
You could try putting the text in the image, but honestly, I feel like the image is complete as is and has enough focal points already. I think maybe a simple white frame with the text (like a Polaroid) could work.
I couldn’t help myself… I HAD to sculpt a little t-rex skull for the top.
I played around with the frame idea for while, I couldn’t quite get the polaroid look working, but the frame border stuck and a friend of mine suggested adding the leaves as if you were peering at the cake from the bushes
Thanks again for your earlier feedback, I don’t think I would had have gone down that frame route without it - I’m getting quite excited to share it with my sister, but gotta wait almost a month
You are a MASTER of composition, I honestly have a lot I could learn from you just based on this piece. I’m going to be looking through your other work trying to learn from it for sure!
I’ve added a little raptor to the back of the cake and some small details just to give some difference to the front, it won’t show up in the main shot, but will be present in the animation.
Which I did a test render of here:
The boil effect on the text and leaves is the only part so far done outside of Blender, a friend of mine applied the effect in After Effects.
After viewing the video, I think it’s going to be really improved if the dinosaurs all do a sort of idle animation. So next task is to convert the curve of the dinosaurs into a mesh, rig and animate a little!
What I’m not sure on is if I should keep the rotation, replace it with slow pans of different areas, or if I should keep the position static and just animate the dinosaurs. I’ll test a few things and see how it plays out.
I’m still struggling with placement of text that says Finlay, one thought I had was to do a page turn transition on the video to look at “inside” the card and have a personal message animated in there with maybe the name as the design I mentioned earlier.
Hey just a bit more progress I have added touches of animation around the cake. I’m not very experienced in animation, so rigging all the elements in the scene was good practice. The dinosaurs are a bit stiff and anamatronic like, but I keep refining :). Every time I make a new render I spot some little detail to change.
My friend told me I had to include a party whistle/blower - so I gave it a go. Initially I had no idea how I was going to make such an animation. Then I came across this tutorial for rolling a map with a curve modifier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YY7XBpAeWE
This technique helped me roll up the party blower, but I wanted to be able to roll and unroll on command. So I made the curve (spiral) a child of the party-blower and used a Copy Location constraint which allowed me to move the spiral closer and further away by using the influence property. Once that was in place, animating the blower unravelling and rolling up was as easy as key framing that influence value. I was happy enough with the result, even if it doesn’t inflate when it rolls out
I also add little bubbles to the caramel lava, which is so subtle that I question if it were worth the effort, but I had fun doing them!
For the bubbles I added a sphere with a small hole in the top, then used shape keys to sculpt the “popping” over two different stages.
Having the animation driven by shape keys allowed me to reuse the same bubble many times across the overall length of the animation and I managed to cover all the bubbles using only two spheres.
From here I will keep polishing for a while, before I turn to maybe looking at a transition to “inside” the card. The one thing that is nagging at me is that the party blower in the large dinosaurs mouth, doesn’t make a sound - maybe I will venture into audio as well, but it has already ballooned past where I originally expected to leave it haha.
The marzipan looks super accurate as well. I honestly really like the area around the cake, it’s simple and draws your attention to the cake. I would personally leave the background as is.
