Making of Fruit tarts

“Making of Fruit Tarts ” by Hau Ming (Jamie) Li

To make a fruit fresh and wet looking without waterdrops
It is very simple really, all you need is a black and white noise file with a tint of light blue for the color balance for the secondary specularity attribute and a little bit of reflection. On the left is a red grape with the default secondary attribute which means no file texture. On the right is a grape with the noise file texture for the secondary specularity attribute. Next is the added reflection.

Lighting

I used 3 Point Lights, 2 Area Lights and an HDRI. The main light is the back light with an orange color to represent the sun coming into the room hitting the surfaces of the fruits. Then I add a low intensity Area Light hitting the side of the raspberries with the same orange color as the back light. I had that Area Light light-linked to the selected bulbs of the raspberries, which I named litballs, as well as the custard of that tart to give that realistic look.

Skin shader is a very processor-expensive node if you are not using it to texture a character. Food is more translucent than human skin, so the values in the attribute of the skin shader are a lot higher, along with the scale conversion as the more translucent it is, the more noise you will see. So you have to add higher values in the scale conversion to balance it. You can adjust the lightmap as well, if you want smaller values in the scale conversion. The skin shader can only take so much before it gets corrupted by tweaking it for so long. It turns black in the hardware view. And if that happens to you, either open the same scene without saving it, or use a fresh node and copy and paste the attributes from the old node to the new node.
Back to lighting, I added a point light with a reddish raspberry color inside each of the raspberries to enhance the translucencies. I also added a low negative point light of -2 to absorb the lights and enhance the shadows at the front right between the raspberry tart and the pomegranate tart. Be careful with the use of the negative light as it is more expensive than a positive light with FG. In addition, it makes the neighboring textures bleed if the intensity is too high. So use very little.

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