Chocolate Cake

I created this chocolate cake still life project in Jan 2021 to practice procedural shading. I wanted to improve at two things in particular: surfacing an object I have never tried before (cake) to look photoreal and using Substance Designer to create materials. The cake, cherry, frosting, cloth, and wood/marble materials were created in Designer. I created two compositions to show the cake at various angles.

The cake, plate, and fork models were downloaded for free use from TurboSquid. The cloth was modeled by me.

Programs used: Maya, Substance Designer, Renderman 23.

Chocolate cake vs. sponge cake

While trying to create the cake material, I ran into a lot of frustrations trying to make a moist, fluffy, light, and edible-looking chocolate cake. I followed a mix of other artists’ approaches to cake creation, but my cake still looked “off”. But, after reading up on cake and comparing chocolate cake to, say, sponge cake, I figured out the issue: not all cakes are the same! This observation completely changed my approach. Before, I had been trying to create a sponge material from which I build on to create the cake material; however, the density and weight of chocolate makes chocolate cakes richer and more condensed. So, instead of starting from a sponge, I started with a dirt material I had previously created. This improved the look of my cake dramatically - all I had to do now was to tweak the roughness and height.

Reference Images

Since I’m not a baker myself, I began this project by looking a lot of cake photos. I ultimately decided on chocolate cake because of how elegant chocolate cake presentation looked. Here are some of the images that guided my composition: