Complex Material Help

[BigAl3D]

Okay, so I have a client that sells all sorts of Italian food. They came up with these little delicious-looking dough nuggets with frosting and cinnamon. Being people that think things can be created with a snap of the finger, they want to launch this product and this is the only photo they took and sent to us. This image was smoothed out with Photoshop and edited a bit, but it's not good. Bad lighting, depth of field is wrong and lots of noise.

I can make all of this in C4D and Corona, except for the sugary frosting effect. I'm preparing to tell them I can't do it easily if at all, but wanted to toss it out here. Also if you have seen a material for sale that might look close, I'm open to that too. Thanks.

[maru]

Perhaps some kind of fluid simulation? Or maybe "just" particles interacting with each other metaball-style?

[James Vella]

Maybe do a rough draft then throw it in AI and say put frosting and cinammon on it lol

[BigAl3D]

I also did some searching for textures. The only things that were close were most likely photogrammetry objects which look great, but their materials are very specific to that mesh. Fluid sim sounds interesting, but I'm not an expert in that. I could imaging doing a basic pour on it, convert to mesh and adjust from there.

I can only imaging the horror a.i. would come up with. haha

I think I'm going to turn this one down, but still work on it as a learning project.

[Ealexander]

A few ideas:

Render them without glaze - render them with full glaze (maybe puddles as separate SDS objects) and then do some creative masking in Photoshop - will still require some highlight painting.

Great the glaze material and place it as a second material over each ball and then create a custom opacity mask.  Again - puddles as sperate objects.

You won't get it perfect, but I bet you get it close enough that hte post touch up isn't too bad.

Could a glaze DECAL be useful here?

[Beanzvision]

I think it should be rather easy to do if a bit of time is put in. This was about 15mins of playing around :) There are 2 cubes here, the base (checkered) & icing. I modified the wax material from the Corona mat lib and added the same noise to the opacity and displacement channel. Then I layered 3 additional ''sprinkles'' over it. Might be enough to get you started :)

[romullus]

I agree with Beanzvision, duplicated mesh seems to be the best approach for such materials.

[BigAl3D]

Those are great ideas. I'll give a go and see how they look after coming out of the oven.

[celmar]

hello!  I suppose it's not at all the answer you search, but if you import the "cubes" in zbrush, it will be easy to get a layer of the iced sugar, and re export after in corona-c4d...

[BigAl3D]

Good to know, but I do not have Zbrush. I know C4D has sculpting, just haven't spent too much time playing with it.

[ingemar]

Would it be possible to 3d-scan a few nuggets? I have used the Kiri app many times with small objects and the quality is quite good. And it’s free to try out.

[BigAl3D]

I too have that app and it is really amazing, but the client is trying to rush this launch, but doesn't have the product to send us. Ugh. Otherwise, taking a proper photo AND using Kiri was where my mind was going.