CompuServe Thread

I've never personally done a birthday cake, but perhaps one of the other forum members has. – G

>> I'm just getting started with 3DS. >> makin a good looking birthday cake with frosting. I know this was meant a serious question but unless you've done some prior modeling, you're in for a work out. I would start with the tutorials on the Shaper and the Lofter. One you understand how the lofter works you could build cross sections of the little icing dropplets and loft them. That's probably the toughest part. If you want to edge with frosting you could also do that with a circular path. Count on needing a fair amount of RAM you're going to have quite a few polygons to render.

My first shot would be to use Deform/Fit in the Lofter. Loft a somewhat irregular circle along a straight path and use a side and froont elevation as the fit shapes – should be a good starting point. You might want to make custom bitmaps for the frosting decorations (in your favorite paint package). – Phil

Don, I did a cake once by pre-building the "slices" and lofting them and then using a combination of texture and bump maps, made the frosting show some depth. This approach worked well because we didn't have to fliy too close to the cake in the animation and it still allowed us to cut the cake with a knife and move pieces around. I hope this helps, you may just have to experiment with the materials editor. Jim Beyer