Hi My name is Chakib Rabia a professional 3d Artist from Morocco, I have more than 11 years experience in CG industry and I would like to share with you a "Making of" my new personal work "Moroccan Food".
Since I like making CGI food scenes in my free time and the fasting month Ramadan is coming soon, I've decided to make a scene of different Moroccan dishes and food that I like to see on my table during this holy month. So I chose the Harira (soup) and Chebbakia (sweets), but in the near future I will make the whole Ramadan's Moroccan table with plenty of different food on it.
For this projet I decided to use the amazing Fstorm GPU renderer and I would recommend all artists to give it a try and enjoy their projects with its great speed and simplicity and, trust me ,you're gonna love it as much as I do.
So let's get started !
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Bowl : I've made a simple line profile and added a Lathe & Turbosmooth modifiers.
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Chebbakia : I found a reference from the net of this Moroccan sweets called "Chebbakia" to trace it and added a simple Extrude modifier to it.
I imported basic shape into Zbrush then sculpted the details to make it more organic.
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Chebbakia with Sesame : I made a very basic sesame shape in 3ds max and used the great Soulburn script - Object Painter to scatter it on the sweets ( you can use any scatter tool you want ).
Spoon : I used a simple free spoon model from the net and heavily modified it in Max using FFD modifiers and Zbrush using the Move brush. Then I sculpted the details using a simple Damask pattern (You can find many online).
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Chickpeas : For this one I used a Zbrush sphere and sculpted this basic shape using Move, Inflat & Pinch brushes and kept it really simple.
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Wooden cutting board: I wanted to keep it simple, so I used simple box with a Turbosmooth modifier to smooth the edges.
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Date : I used a simple sphere object. I added an FFD modifier to reshape it a little bit, then added an EditPoly modifier to move some vertices using Soft selection.
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Date Zbrush : I've exported the basic shape in Zbrush, sculpted the details using Noise surface + Standard, Inflat & Pinch brushes, then painted the texture using Polypaint.
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Parsley (
Evermotion 130 model 38) : I've used this great parsley model from Evermotion volume 130 to add the final touch for the soup like showned in references.
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Bowl Painting texture : With Polypaint actived, I've used a Standard brush to paint manually the texture and try to make it close enough like the reference below.
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Bowl mat : The Bowl material.
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Chebbakia (sweets) mat : The Sweets material.
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Harira (soup) mat : The Harira soup material.
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Spoon mat : For the spoon I've used a simple scratches texture in bump slot and a dirt map in glossiness. This way I achieved old silver metal look.
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Viewport : A view of the scene with the textures.
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Wooden Board mat : The cutting board material.
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Fstorm Plane Light 1.
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Fstorm Plane Light 2.
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In this scene I used a simple kitchen Hdri map. Make sure you put 2.2 in Gamma and choose "Spherical envi " in Mapping. I dragged it then as an Instance in Fstorm Environment with "Importance sampling" is On.
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50mm Camera : For food photography I used here a simple 50 mm Target camera.
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Fstorm in action
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Rendering parameters
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Raw render
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Using the High pass filter with a high value to bring out the details of this scene. Ie used a LUT file from my collection but you can test and play with yours, usually I don't render using LUT directly but I like to test them in Fstorm before I decide wich one I'll probably use in Photoshop.
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I've used "Selective color" to modify some red/yellow areas and boost it a little bit especially for the soup and reduce some green intensity of the parsley. I've added a little bit of blue using "Curves" and more contrast, then a Vignette layer and some Chromatic Aberration to add that photographic touch.
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Clay render.
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Final image
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Final image
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Final image
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Final image
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Final image
In addition, I would suggest that you try some Photoshop plugins like Topaz collection and ArionFx - they are great post-production tools. I hope you enjoyed this "Making of"
Best regards!
Chakib Rabia
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