Dev adventures, epic bugs, tiny wins, and the occasional meltdown. Zola 2025-05-21T00:00:00+00:00 https://golden-fox.dev/tags/donut/atom.xml 2025-05-21T00:00:00+00:00 2025-05-21T00:00:00+00:00 Aakriti Agarwal https://golden-fox.dev/blog/blender-donut/ <p>In April 2024, I came across a cool animation made in Blender and thought, ‘Wow! That’s crazy. I want to learn how to do that too’. So, I started my journey</p> <p>At first, I was really confused because there were tons of buttons, shortcuts, tabs and a cube in the middle.</p> <p><strong>Pro tip:</strong> Use <a rel="external" href="https://hollisbrown.github.io/blendershortcuts/"><strong>Blender Shortcuts</strong></a> cheatsheet as it helped me remember the keys.</p> <p>(Shortcut key: X to delete the default cube)</p> <p><img src="https://golden-fox.dev/blog/blender-donut/images/Default-Cube.png" alt="Default-Cube" /></p> <p>So, I did what everyone does when they’re new and lost – I searched for “Blender tutorial for beginners” and came across the <em>iconic donut</em> tutorial by <a rel="external" href="https://www.youtube.com/@blenderguru/featured"><strong>BlenderGuru</strong></a>. If you want to learn Blender, start by making a donut 🍩. Most people begin their Blender journey here.</p> <h2 id="what-i-learned-throughout-the-tutorial-series">What I Learned Throughout the Tutorial Series</h2> <h3 id="part-1-modeling-the-donut-base">Part 1: Modeling the Donut Base</h3> <p>I started by doing what every Blender user does, that is to delete the default cube.Then I added a torus and began learning how to navigate in 3D space.</p> <p><img src="https://golden-fox.dev/blog/blender-donut/images/Torus-Mesh.png" alt="Torus-Mesh" /></p> <h3 id="part-2-adding-realistic-details">Part 2: Adding Realistic Details</h3> <p>I started adding little bumps and imperfections to make my donut look like it came from a real bakery instead of a computer. I found this part really satisfying once I got used to the sculpting brushes.</p> <h3 id="part-3-creating-icing">Part 3: Creating Icing</h3> <p>This part blew my mind. I duplicated my donut, scaled it up slightly and used Blender’s modifier system to create icing that actually dripped down the sides using a sculpting brush grab.</p> <h3 id="part-4-making-it-look-like-real-food">Part 4: Making It Look Like Real Food</h3> <p>I learned to create realistic surfaces using the shader editor. The donut got texture and the icing became glossy.</p> <h3 id="part-5-adding-sprinkles">Part 5: Adding Sprinkles</h3> <p>I created different types of sprinkles - long and round ones. I used geometry nodes for this. The setup involved using “Distribute Points on Faces” to scatter points across the icing surface, then “Instance on Points” to place the sprinkle geometry. I controlled the sprinkle density with a named attribute and used Collection Info to randomly choose between different sprinkle shapes. The geometry nodes gave me precise control over placement, rotation and scale variation etc.</p> <p>Geometry Node for Long Sprinkles: <img src="https://golden-fox.dev/blog/blender-donut/images/Long_Sprinkles.png" alt="Long Sprinkles" /></p> <p>Geometry Node for Round Sprinkles: <img src="https://golden-fox.dev/blog/blender-donut/images/Short_Sprinkles.png" alt="Round Sprinkles" /></p> <h3 id="part-6-making-the-background-and-adding-textures">Part 6: Making the Background and Adding Textures</h3> <p>Once the donut was done, I added a simple plane for the tabletop and textured it with a marble material using a Principled BSDF shader for realism. Then, I modeled a plate for the donut and applied a shiny ceramic material with subtle imperfections.</p> <p>I duplicated the donuts a few times and stacked them on the plate. The combination of textures and stacked donuts really brought everything together.</p> <p><img src="https://golden-fox.dev/blog/blender-donut/images/Donut-Plate.png" alt="Donut Plate" /></p> <p>After this I set up the lighting to make the donut look good and positioned the camera and added depth of field to blur the background.</p> <h3 id="part-8-creating-my-final-render">Part 8: Creating My Final Render</h3> <p>The last step was generating the final image. I learned about render settings, balancing quality with render time and made some basic color corrections to enhance the scene.</p> <p>I used Cycles with GPU compute for faster rendering. After adjusting the settings, I rendered the scene and was finally able to see my donut in all its glory.</p> <p><strong>Final Result!</strong> <img src="https://golden-fox.dev/blog/blender-donut/images/Donut.png" alt="" /></p> <p>I had so much fun creating it, and I’m so happy with the final result. I never expected it would turn out this well. I’ll be spending this week getting back to learning more about Blender, and I’ll be sharing my progress soon.</p> <p>I hope you enjoyed this blog post :)</p>