Making a donut in Blender

My classmate Thomas is a blender artist. His renders are pretty good and it inspred me to learn blender, a free and open source 3D graphics software.

In October of 2023, I started to watch Blender Guru’s Donut tutorial. Apparently, making a donut is the first thing most newbies do. ‘It is like the “hello world” in programming but for Blender’. (from youtube comment section)

Creating a donut gives you a pretty good idea about some of the most commonly used tools and things you can do in Blender.

As I started following along the videos, I began to realize that creating a donut was more dfficult that I had expected. Sometimes I would mess things up and had to watch the videos again and again. Sometimes, I even had to start all the way from the beginning.

After a while, I got really frustrated and decided to just quit because I couldn’t get rid of clipping on my icing.

Two or three weeks before, Thomas told me that Blender Guru had released a brand new updated donut tutorial and asked me to give it a try again. Not only that but Blender 4.0 was also released. So I decided to start again.

IMO, I found the new tutorial much more easier to follow along. In this one, the donut guy also explained some of the common problems people face and how it could be fixed. Furthermore, the comment section was really helpful.

One of the fascinating aspect of working with Blender is that ‘imperfection is the digital perfection’. In the case of a donut, we start out with a shape called a torus. It is a perfect shape. But for our render to be more realistic and interesting, we have to add imperfections like bumps and asymmetry to it. When putting the sprinkles on the donut, the colors, material and the distribution of sprinkles should not be predictable.

My laptop is an old machine and doesn’t really have the horsepower to do heavy work like this. Blender crashed when I tried to add an image texture on the rectangular slab. Anyway here is the render (yes, the ligting is not proper, I will fix it).

So what is next?

I am learning Blender just for fun. I don’t want to be a professional or anything. I just want to create some renders and share it with my friends. Next, I am planning on creating a low poly car.

Conclusion

I am really happy I was able to go so far in the tutorial. There is still a few more parts I need to watch to complete the tutorial.

If you have time, you should try to create one as well.

This is day 17 of #100DaystoOffload