Cooking in 3D
Café de Beignet takes place in a French pätisserie, and I was charged with making some appropriate-looking pastries to decorate it. Here’s a render of some of them:
Cool, no? Here’s a look at how a few of them were made.
Danish Pastry
The model for this was particularly easy. It looked great at 64 quads, but I made a more detailed version at 336 quads in case it was going to be in the foreground at all.
The fun was in the texturing. Here’s how it was done, step-by-step.
Bake an ambient occlusion pass to use as a guide and to generate initial texture and lighting. AO is a raytraced effect, and as such is noisy by nature. This is a great way to add a little randomness to your image right from the start.
Add some colour. I chose two suitable colours, used the clouds filter and set the layer mode to Color.
Paint in the twist marks. The markings that give it its distinctive shape are caused by twists made when the dough was still soft. This has two effects - it introduces relief, meaning you have to consider shadows and highlights, and it leaves thin bits of pastry that cook more quickly and end up darker than the rest. I created a custom brush for the burnt bits and used the burn tool to add shadows.
Icing sugar / highlights. On my reference photo, highlights and icing sugar were indistinguishable. This seemed a bit odd, but I decided to copy the effect. Using a brush that looked suitably sugary, I painted in white where highlights would be appropriate.
Add custard. A speckled layer mask and the Bevel and Emboss layer style were all that was needed for the glossy, uneven look of the custard.
Dribble over icing. Icing on Danish pastries is far more liquid when applied than usual, so it’s dribbled over rather than piped. Bear this in mind as you paint the layer mask for it - smooth, pendulous strokes are needed. Again the Bevel and Emboss style comes in handy for showing off the shape. Remember that it’s not entirely opaque.
Croissant
Photos aren’t always enough when you’re researching for a model. I felt I needed to understand how a croissant was made before I could model an accurate representation of it. (A more dedicated team might have sent me to France to study a master croissant-maker at work for a week, but apparently Café de Beignet’s budget didn’t stretch that far.) Once you understand the initial shape, and how it’s rolled up, and how it expands in the oven, it becomes much more mysterious. And the main concept you have to convey is how the rolled up layers create the final shape.
This made it surprisingly difficult to model. If you trace one of the edge loops, you’ll realise that it’s actually a long spiral. Lining these up and filling the polygons without distortion was challenging. But I’m pleased with the result.
Painting the texture was a similar process as used on the Danish pastry, but this one had an added “flaky” effect. This was achieved using the following filters: Clouds, Stained Glass and Find Edges. This generated a layer mask, which could then be used to apply a layer style suitable to reveal the flakes.
Cupcakes
The cupcakes were nice to model. The crimped paper wrapping meant that I had to use lots of polygons (the final model was about 950 quads), and it was an interesting enough shape to make unwrapping the UVs a challenge.
Painting the texture was easy in comparison. I started with a baked ambient occlusion layer, and added solid colours with layer masks restricting their effect to the correct area. This isn’t the easiest way to do it, but it meant that when I had to create different coloured versions, I just had to change the colour of one layer, which was handy.
Notice the outside of the paper case is in two sections. This made it tough to line up the heights of where the icing shows through. But by painting onto the textures in 3D mode, and by a bit of trial and error, the join is not visible.