Here is a small still-life I did on-off for about four days. It’s not perfect, but I think it still came out pretty good. I faced some interesting challenges, some unexpected:
- The very subtle fuzz on the surface of the bodies… used scattered curves with perlin flow noise. It adds a nice almost scratchy texture that you can see in some references.
- Getting just enough detail on the seeds.
- Using a mix of traditional surface hair and scattered spore spheres for the back strawberry.
Maya / Mari / Houdini (Arnold).
The seeds were instanced and used to deflate the body inwards. The higher mesh density on the body was the easiest way to achieve this effect. For real-time or a background prop, I would have baked its data onto a low-poly cage but it was unnecessary in this case.
Here is the shader network for the strawberry body. It’s mostly quite straightforward, with some extra noises to add breakup in the specular and bump. The coat is used as a shinier specular lobe for the wetness of the body, and to emphasize the fact it’s another layer, it has a weaker bump than the main specular. Maybe one other quirk is that I use a 0-1 specular map in this case to remap to an IOR range instead of plugging it into the specular weight. This is my preference when available since you get the spec variation without breaking physicality as readily.