Dark chocolate

Hi Experts

Can anybody give me some tips about rendering chocolate please, THX in advance

1.png
 
Looks pretty good. Nice packaging. I'd say increase the specular / reflection some and add a little more beveling so it catches more light. Some Sub-Surfaces Scattering would help, but we don't have that yet.
 
THX Zoo, but I have to deal with dark chocolate for commercial use and Costomer wants to look it less "plastic", BTW I saw your before because I did search "chocolate" here
 
Well here's the same material with a darker color and various changes to specular and reflection if it's helpful.

Dark Choc 01.jpg
Dark Choc 02.jpg
Dark Choc 03.jpg
 
THX Zoo: Yes that's the problem, no reference exept for the package, the chocolate is verry bad (it is not tempered good) so its like a mold
 
Both Zoo's second material and Frank's material look really good. I'll have to admit I'm pretty terrible with creating materials. I never thought to pump just a color node into the other slots. I've only ever done it with a texture. Danke Frank.
 
While Frank's material is quite good, imho it's still not that convincing. I guess Charless has to compete again against other software. And, again, chocolate would highly benefit from SSS. With that it's actually not that difficult to create a good chocolate material as long as you have something of a specialist around who can advise you (if the mouth of your victim starts to water, you're near there).

Second is the problem with all product shots: It should look convincing but without the real blemishes of such a material (which, of course is a contradiction).

So in Cheetah I'd try to simulate sss with some very slight luminositiy in a lighter brown, maybe controlled through a texture map to get some subtle variation (the emphasis is on subtle).

Second chocolate is a very greasy material, so it's very shiny, but also very blurred. Depending on the quality of the chocolate (i. e. what are the ingredients? How much is the percentage of cocoa vs cheaper stuff like (evil) palm oil and so on) that varies very much. So you'd need at least a photography of the real stuff that's actually depicted to know how it should shine and how blurry it really is (if no photo is available, you use just some expensive high quality dark chocolate).

Maybe I'd try something in addition to this. Buy a bar of high quality chocolate and first of course do what I usually do: Stare at it and try to see what's special about it, try to understand it, and as esoteric as it sounds, try to understand it.

While that could be done with any dark chocolate you like, even with nuts, the next part would need a simple dark chocolate without any other ingredients (like salt, chili or whatever they put in it nowadays). Just plain, bitter, dark chocolate.

Before you eat it, try to photograph the backside in a very diffuse light, without any visible highlights on it. Cloudy days at noon can be very good for that. Create a texture from that and more or less use it as Frank has done (with some changes to the roughness, of course). (the backside is usually one smooth surface).

If you are like me and don't like dark chocolate very much (well, in real good quality I start to like it), find somebody else who is willing to eat it after all you have done with it on the way.

Good luck
 
I guess this is too realistic;

Not to me. It's still visibly 3d because of that looked for 'perfect look' is wished for a product render. It's between fully realistic chocolate (I think, the guy could achieve that look if wanted) and the plastic extreme on the other side. The imperfections are not that visible from far away (those close-ups are not part of the advertisement) but still do a lot to make the material more convincing.

That said, I just asked myself when I saw a real good photo of such things; in advertisement 3d seems to be more common meanwhile for product shots (and what's still photographed that it looks very much 3d). That does influence us because that perfect look somehow is what we expect (and even big firms very often have very bad 3d pictures in my opinion because they kill all the reflections and so on. For me the product looks often 'dead').

That's why I recommend to look at the real thing if anyway possible and try to recreate that instead of a (3d) photo. You'll lose for sure some subtleties on the way and so will get on the same level as other good 3d images.

I really do stare a lot at real things to see how it behaves with light, how it feels, how it shines, how it reflects and so on.
 
Not to me. It's still visibly 3d because of that looked for 'perfect look' is wished for a product render. It's between fully realistic chocolate (I think, the guy could achieve that look if wanted) and the plastic extreme on the other side. The imperfections are not that visible from far away (those close-ups are not part of the advertisement) but still do a lot to make the material more convincing.

That said, I just asked myself when I saw a real good photo of such things; in advertisement 3d seems to be more common meanwhile for product shots (and what's still photographed that it looks very much 3d). That does influence us because that perfect look somehow is what we expect (and even big firms very often have very bad 3d pictures in my opinion because they kill all the reflections and so on. For me the product looks often 'dead').

That's why I recommend to look at the real thing if anyway possible and try to recreate that instead of a (3d) photo. You'll lose for sure some subtleties on the way and so will get on the same level as other good 3d images.

I really do stare a lot at real things to see how it behaves with light, how it feels, how it shines, how it reflects and so on.

Great work this guy: https://www.behance.net/timcooper3D
 
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