The Family Favorite Salad

Visual Reference

Took photos of the ingredients and process.

Modeling

The modeling began! Since the salad had many components, it took me quite a while to complete the model, especially since in the first model of the salad, I used instances instead of particle system, and for the arugula leaves, I edited each one to have a unique shape.

I used the tools in blender to create the materials and texture. Since my intended 3D modeling style was not hyper realistic, I wanted to play well with the colors and textures to make the ingredients recognizble yet simple and stylized. I used voronoi texture and played slightly with the roughness at first.

For the initial animation, I used liquid simulator to simulate the ranch dressing being added onto the salad. While I believe the animation looked great, and I was especially proud of the material and texture, I received feedback in Phase 01 that the animation could be more interesting and dynamic with the salad, by making the ingredients fall into the bowl. While that was my initial plan as well, I scrapped it since I tried using cloth simulator to make the arugula fall nicely, but it kept failing, and the collision between the object was not what I wanted. I was also advised to make the texturing a bit more realistic as the eggplant was not recognizable as well as the tomatoes.

Fixing Model

For the model, I kept my previous work and simply added more texturing to it. I used bump and displacement in the shader to make the textures pop, I also played with the roughness much more this time around to make it visible.

Fixing Animation

since I received feedback on the previous animation of the ranch dressing, I attempted a few methods to create the salad ingredients falling. Since rigid body did not work in the way I wanted, and manual key framing did not look ideal, I finally chose to use particle system!

I created a new file, and instead of using instances, I chose 1-3 versions of each ingredient, put them into a collection, then used particle system emitter to create more of each, and played with the randomness in size and rotation to make it look natural. The trick to making them fall into the bowl at different times was using the settings in the particle system to make it emit the ingredient at a specific frame. I faced some issues with the collisions, but in true animation fashion I was able to find work arounds to still make it appear like it had no faults.

I also attempted to add the ranch dressing simulation once more, but the combination of particle system and liquid simulation was too heavy and was taking too much time to fix and perfect. And so this was the final product!