Rendering in Blender: Donut

Setting the Stage

It's May 2020, my roommate and childhood best friend asks if I want to queue up for another round of Dead By Daylight, some competive game that him and I have played on and off for a few years. Sure, it's not like we have anything else to do right now, not like we could do anything else at least.

He was on "extended leave" from his job in the hospitality industry since sports areanas were shut down. I lost my internship and job offer during spring break when the economy collapsed and my company had to freeze all hiring practices and shut down production. It was fun for the first few days, having the whole day to ourselves with no responsibilities almost made it feel like when we were kids. But that feeling of freedom was starting to turn into stagnation.

I had to come up with a way to feel productive in this shutdown world. I had always wanted try out modeling and game design, but I never felt like I had the artistic ability to make a good effort at it. I found some great tutorials and documentation and decided to set aside some time each day to work on it.

About the Project

This project was made as my first introduction to Blender. There is a very helpful guide by Andrew Price, aka the Blender Guru, on YouTube that made this project possible. In that I learned how to model, apply texturing, bitmaps, normal maps, and set up lighting for rendering. The project culminated in the final 3 second render of a donut on a plate, sliding into frame with a cup of coffee in the background.

Every model was created by hand and scene setup was done manually. The textures came from a free asset library website. The whole project was a fun experience, and really made me realize it was much easier to acquire skills out of my wheel house than I expected.

This project was made in Blender 2.8, but Blender has had a lot of changes since then. Andrew has released an updated version of this class, and I would highly recommend using it if you would like to recreate this project. I have attached a link to the tutorial playlist below.

Link to Tutorial Link To Blend File

Final Video

First Render

Final Render