Making the Cheddar Warrior — the cheesy bits
You could argue that the entire Cheddar Warrior scene is a bit cheesy. But there’s a wedge of Edam cheese in there that presented its own challenge along with its own simple solution.
1 - Basic modeling
You don’t get 3D models much simpler than this one. It’s ready for some cheesy materials now
2 - Basic materials applied
Here’s the cheese with some nice cheese-coloured materials on it. But it doesn’t look right. That yellow part doesn’t look like cheese. It looks more like yellow plastic. I couldn’t figure out why at first
3 - Crusty edges
Edam cheese is a bit tougher around the edges and also a bit darker. So I’ve made that change. It looks a bit better, but it still looks fake.
4 - SSS
Then I realised that cheese is not completely opaque. It lets a tiny bit of light through the thin parts, and the solution was suddenly obvious.
In many materials, light penetrates the skin and scatters for a short distance below the surface. That’s what happens in things like human skin, a glass of milk, candle wax, and cheese. 3D artists call that lighting effect ‘sub-surface scattering’. Most of the time we shorten that down to ‘SSS’ to save all that typing.
Once I turned on the SSS in my cheese it looked good enough to eat. I could move onto the next thing in the scene.
- The foreground leaves
- The background tree
- Making a mouse
- The hairy bits
- The hazy bits
- Looking through the water
- Sticking it all together