Overview
As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In engineering, visuals are used to convey to customers how a product should look, feel, and work. I recently have been thinking about that more as I create more 3D models in my free time. In the past, I’ve only created renderings and short animations using SOLIDWORKS, but those results felt disconnected from the real world; there was a lack of creative flexibility. I wanted to supplement my modeling by learning Blender, a software my friend Michael recommended during our university days.
I found a 16-part tutorial series by the “Blender Guru” on YouTube that provided a step-by-step to making a donut, while showcasing key features of Blender 3.0. I had a really fun time making this and hope to create different “flavors” of donuts in the future! Here’s my journey of making my own donut.
Topics Learned
‣ Object Editing, Modeling, Modifiers, Sculpting, Painting, Texturing, Geometry Nodes, Compositing, Animation, and Rendering
Milestones
‣ Creating the Donut
To start off, I added a torus shape and modified the thickness to match a donut. In reality, donuts have imperfections: grooves, dents, nooks, and crannies. I was able to create these by dragging specific vectors in modeling mode and by using the “draw” tool in sculpting mode.
Using texture paint, I was able to give the donut a tan look, while adding a pale ring around the middle to resemble the frying line.
‣ Adding Icing
The most difficult part to model was definitely the icing. It was created by making a duplicate of the top half of the donut and “wrapping” it around the donut.
The resulting icing was flat and linear. I used a subdivision surface modifier as well as the “blob” and “smooth” sculpting tools to make the lines look more organic.
‣ Adding Sprinkles
One of the interesting features Blender has is geometry nodes. Instead of creating dozens of sprinkles and placing them in specific points on the icing, I was able to “program” the software to do that for me.
I created four unique sprinkles and mapped them along the icing. I used different mathematical and random functions to create instances in different rotations and colors. It took a long time to tweak the settings to my desired sprinkle-to-icing ratio.
‣ Animation
Now that I finished creating the donut, I wanted to animate it to give it an advertisement-like quality. I learned to compose the shot by adjusting the camera and light settings to achieve the optimal scene. I also created a backdrop of falling sprinkles by using more geometry nodes.
To make the donut spin, I added keyframes and adjusted the movement curves to control the donut’s rotation speed.
After a few days of hard work, the only thing left was to sit back and let my computer do the rendering.
