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A little breakdown of how I made my 3D recreation of the "thank you sunakawa" cake from Ore Monogatari ~

1. Collecting reference

Aside from referencing stills from the anime, I came across the official cake sketch from Madhouse's website! It was really helpful in identifying all the toppings on the cake and other details.

Next was collecting real-life references of all the ingredients I needed to make and taking notes of the shapes, textures and variety.

2. Modelling & Texturing

I go back and forth between modelling and texturing, and jump all over the place so I'll break things down based on the toppings/elements:

A. Macaron

I referenced Canosie Lab's macaron tutorial here, tweaking the process a little bit; using one mesh instead of two and using particles to distribute the boolean meshes. I ended up with LOTS of vertices, so I made a lower poly version of the macaron and used those to avoid bogging down the computer. As for the texture, I used Blender's procedural nodes, utilizing mostly the noise texture node.

Above: The first row are the lower poly versions of the macaron and the second row are the original meshes with around 200,000 vertices each o_o

B. Cookies

There's not much to it here; I just modeled the cookies and used procedural textures I've made for a previous project (I'll post that project soon!!!)

The icing is made using bezier curves with some bevel depth. I used the draw tool to draw on the cookies. I did the same for the writings on the cake.

C. Strawberries

I've previously made strawberries for another project so I just used those but baked them to a lower poly mesh first. I used Canosie Labs' strawberry tutorial as reference :) I initially used a scaled down version of the regular-sized strawbs, but decided to make a proper mini strawberry 🍓

Left: with scaled down regular strawberries, Right: proper mini strawberries.

I made them super shiny with lots of subsurface scattering to make them look juicy and gummy-like -- not the most realistic but I think they look cuter like this :>

D. Orange slices

The orange slices were the most challenging to make! Did a lot of trial and error to get that pulpy texture oranges have but I managed using a combination of voronoi nodes :") If you look at the pictures below, you can see how the orange looked in the beginning vs. at the end after I refined it some more.

They look fine from a distance but a little janky up close; maybe I'll do a breakdown one day once I figure out a proper node setup.

Above: before & after

Left to right: rendered, colour only, B/W

E. Orange peel

A simple plane with a solidify and curve modifier. What's most important here is the texture! I used two different shaders (one for the pith another for the peel) combined using a mask.

F. Jelly beans & choco marbles

A tweaked subdivided square for the jelly beans and subdivided icosphere for the choco marbles. The two use pretty much the same shaders but the jelly beans have more subsurface scattering.

H. Cake

After placing all the toppings, I sculpted the cake (using the multires modifier) a little bit to model the cream that's displaced.