Create Photorealistic Foods in Blender: Macaron time! #tutorial

hi today i wanted to show you a way of creating macaroons with blender i wanted to try this out because while looking to see if such a tutorial existed i noticed some people saying that it's probably too difficult or just buy the ones on sketch fab or turbosquid and while those do look fine they are photo scanned i really wanted to make one that was procedurally generated or at least as much as possible and not depend on any photo scanned objects so let's start by talking about macaroons they compose the three main parts the cap the dome-shaped most upper part of the shell they come in different shapes and sizes some are very round and other is flat the feet this part expands or grows as the macaroon is baked feet come in different shapes as well and filling this is the easiest part to model in fact on some macaroons you can barely see the filling at all so right away i knew that the feet part of the macaroons were going to be the most difficult part it has this random crunchy organic texture that i've never seen in other objects i knew it would require some form of noise-based displacement but that was it i went on experimenting with different techniques and after a while i came up with something that looks pretty good at least equivalent to the photo scan models so before i get started i wanted to point out that i wrote out a fairly detailed blog post about the process i took to figure this all out i think that's the most important part this video is a summary not a click-by-click walkthrough for pure beginners you can also find a download to the macaroon shell material used in the video on the blog as well i've posted the link in the description box below with that let's get started start by deleting the cube and creating a sphere the sphere should have a diameter of around 1.5 inches or 38 millimeters it's important to keep the sizes of our objects as close to their real counterparts as possible especially since we'll be modifying the depth of field frequently in our renders we can keep the number of segments to 32 and rings at 16. that should be enough for the level displacement we'll do further on in vertex select mode highlight the bottom half of the sphere and delete it select the bottom edge and add a face by clicking f use the inset tool a few times to create some geometry on the bottom now we've imported a reference image with x-ray mode we just want to first compress stretch and scale the model until the mesh more or less takes the overall shape of the macaroon shell cap create the seams we'll need one seam down the side one around the bottom edge and another one at the bottom after that apply rotation and scale smooth shading and uv unwrap the object macaroons don't have perfect domes for their shells we want to create the unevenness as they rise in the oven first create some geometry by adding a subdivision modifier set the levels to three now add a displace modifier afterwards create a new displacement texture set the strength to 0.002 for the texture itself we want to select clouds and the size to be 0.02 this creates the waviness we want now as we look around we see this gentle unevenness throughout the surface of the cap i often modify these values to create variations between the models as needed i've already created the shell and feet materials i won't go into detail here but to describe how i developed them on my blog now assign the object to shell material in face select mode select only faces of the bottom of the model and assign the feed material this creates a nice transition between the shell and the feet if you find the bumps too large in the uv editing tab you can scale the uv mapping until you get the desired bump size on your model and that's it at least for the cap portion now off to the most important and most difficult part the feet the most difficult part in making a macaroon model is the feet this by far took me the longest to figure out and what makes or breaks the photorealism aside from photoscan based models none of the models that i saw looked real and the primary reason were the feet macro and feet come in all different shapes and sizes some stick out while others don't all have this crunchy texture with many dimples and holes most have deep crevices that run for some length around the foot's equator here i will show you the general procedure for creating realistic feet but as we saw that macaroons take different forms you may need to make slight tweaks in order to reproduce the look you desire let's start with creating a cylinder it has 64 vertices and has a diameter around 1.5 inches or 38 millimeters the height should be about four millimeters create two loop cuts slide one to the top and slide the other to the bottom this allows the cylinder to keep its shape after we add a subdivision modifier on the bottom surface create four or five insets do the same for the top add a subdivision surface modifier set the levels to three apply smooth shading now add a displace modifier it's going to look pretty crazy at first create a new texture and name it feet set the strength to 0.002 now in the textures tab select the feed texture and set the type to clouds set the size to around 0.001 set the material to the feed material adjust the size of the object so it's the same diameter as the shell apply rotation and scale afterwards move the mesh up until it's just touching the bottom of the shell apply the modifiers on the foot model starting with the subdivision modifier then the displacement after rendering you should see something like this as before i provided the details of the materials on my blog you can copy it from there and that's our base mesh for the macaroon's feet now we need to create the crunchy holes and crevices we're going to do this by creating a bumpy sphere and using the boolean modifier to carve out holes from our base mesh first start with a sphere with a radius of four millimeters create a subdivision modifier like before we're going to use a displaced modifier using a texture the strength should be 0.002 in the textures tab use the clouds texture and set the strength to be 0.002 apply smooth shading you can vary the size and strength to create the kind of bump pattern you need you can also change the shape of the sphere as well as making it bigger or smaller depending on the kind of hole you want to create just make sure you apply rotation and scale after changing the size now what we're going to do is move your sphere over to the feet mesh and make it embed about 50 into it you can resize your sphere depending on how large of a hole you want to create select the feet mesh create a boolean modifier and the target object should be your sphere the overlap threshold needs to be very small once everything is in position click apply if done successfully once you move the sphere away you should be left with a nice crunchy hole carved out of the macaroon feet mesh now we just want to keep repeating this stamping or punching out holes around the face of our macro and mesh each time we want to change the size and or rotation of our hole punch for variation remember to apply rotation and scale of your hole punch after each resizing you will want to render after a few holes and you should see something like this this does take some practice and after a while with some practice you should be getting some realistic renders like this now the filling is quite simple not too much of it is usually visible the material is really simple so i won't go through it here but i talk about it in detail on my blog again just copy the material nodes from there for the mesh start with a torus where the major radius is 10 millimeters and the minor radius is anywhere between one to four millimeters add a subdivision modifier with render level three again we'll create the natural bumps in the filling using yet another displaced modifier for the displaced texture create a new one called filling the strength is 0.001 apply smooth shading rotation and scale in the textures tab the filling texture is a cloud texture with a size of 0.003 resize the mesh to the desired thickness remember to apply rotation and scale after you resize i sign in the filling material and render you should see something like this now i've brought all three of our models together to finalize our macaroon we want to select the shell and foot model duplicate and rotate move into position and now we want to rotate along the z axis this gives us some variation of the holes and crevices around the macaroons equator we do not want the same pattern on the bottom model to be right above it on the top model no macaroon is perfect human hands press them together so we can achieve some of this imperfection by rotating the pair of models so that they are not totally level with the horizon and there we have it non-photo scanned macaroons while there are some manual steps in creating the crevices we've made use of procedural methods as much as possible i like this method for making macaroons because you can vary each of the texture strengths to create different kinds of macaroons you see in real life let me know if you have any questions thanks for watching

Channel: Canosie Labs

Views: 7,169

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Id: Mb7AJz7pcw8

Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021