A collection of things I've been making on and off with Blender for the past several months.

This was my attempt at creating a realistic plate of chuutoro sushi. The texture for the tuna was created using Substance Painter which I waited for the 2025 Steam release. I bought a single-month subscription for 2800 yen to test before considering the perpetual license. The Steam version unfortunately doesn't have access to the official assets library but it does ship with an adequate amount of default assets like noise and brushes which was enough to create my own organic textures. I'm pretty happy with the results and also find the layer-based work flow really intuitive akin to Photoshop or any other image editing software.

This ones's a render of an orthodox melon cream soda that you might see in a family restaurant/diner. If I ever make a tutorial for Blender in the future it'll probably be about making this since the process used a good variety of techniques.

The glass, liquid and ice all use a transparent shader material and I tweaked some render settings to make it have clean looking reflections of the surrounding HDR. I used geometry nodes to distribute the multi-colored sprinkles on the icecream as well as three layers of bubbles in the drink to sell the carbonation. One thing I wasn't able to figure out was creating a frothy gradient towards the surface where the icecream would have melted into the drink.

I bought Balatro at the end of last year and thought it was a perfect subject for recreating in a realistic render. You can't really see the effect in a still shot but the second joker from the left has a reflective coating that changes based on the angle.

I coincidentally made this a couple days before she announced that she was quitting Hololive. Added some style to the render so that I could use it as a wallpaper for my vertical monitor.

I just had to after listening to the sushi glory hole cover. I tried using fspy which is an open source program that helps recreate the camera aperture based off a photo but unfortunately the source image was zoomed in too much to have enough perspective lines. The silver tape was creating by shrink wrapping a textured plane around the hole which was really jank but the crumpled texture covered up most imperfections. The model for Irys and Shiori (who's hand is poking out) was fan-made by @sunekosurisuri.