Creating a Donut In Blender — Rendering the Donut

4 min readMay 12, 2021

This tutorial will directly follow the video: https://youtu.be/ZTxBrjN1ugA and will pickup from where we left off here: https://raizadaabhay.medium.com/creating-a-donut-in-blender-sculpting-the-donut-2d9b116082e5

In this tutorial, we’ll be covering lighting and rendering, so far we’ve been using the viewport mode, to switch to render view mode click the hotkey Z and select rendered

2. If you zoom out in this mode you’ll see that you have a light, go ahead and bring that light closer to the donut

3. Now we wish to see the shadow of our donut on the plane, with the 3d cursor on the center (Shift + C if not) press Shift + A which brings up the menu to add new things, then select mesh and plane.

4. Now we wish to move our donut above the plane but the icing and donut are not linked and hence move separately, to make the icing a child of the donut, first click on the child(the icing) then shift + click the parent(the donut) and then hit Ctrl + P and then select Object(Keep Transform)

5. Now you can click on the donut and move and the icing comes with it.

6. We can also click on object data properties (the light bulb icon) and change the power of the light according to however you want it. This is how it looks for me with these settings

7. Now the current renderer being used is Evee which is good for optimization and working but for a more realistic view we’re going to switch to cycles. To do this go to the rendering panel from the properties plane and on render engine, select cycles.

You can go ahead and change the device to gpu if you have a decent gpu.

8. Now we need to use the camera to actually snap our mode, to use the camera press numberpad 0 , or select the camera and find this icon.

9. After going in to the camera press G for grab, hit the middle mouse button and zoom in towards the donut. Moving the camera can be tricky and this blender manual can help you in understanding the camera movement. Navigation — Blender Manual. Also this setting in the view properties can help you navigate it better as well.

10. Move the camera around until you have a nice shot, mine looks like this

11. For even lighting you can move the lamp further away.

12. Now one last thing we can do here is to give some color to our plane to do this, select the plane object and on the properties plane, click on materials and then new.