I wanted to challenge myself to create a delicious dessert from scratch – fully in 3D.  Everything you see in this image is 100% CGI and modeled by myself from scratch (minus the Quixel megascan mint leaves).

I started sculpting the icecream and bowl in Zbrush, and created an organic shaped spoon to place next to it.  The chocolate chips are made out of a rock IMM brush and hand placed in Zbrush.  Then I exported everything out and UV Unwrapped it to get it ready for texturing.

I brought the models into C4D (using one subdivision lower than the highest quality to increase performance, and compensating with the baked normals/displacement/AO maps via the texture for a higher quality look – just as is done in videogame production) and placed everything into the scene.  I tried to match the composition and lighting of my reference photo, and created a unique matcha icecream texture in Octane’s render engine.  Once the scene was lit, I simulated a quick matcha powder texture (to place on the tray) via X-Particles and rendered everything out.

Lastly I retouched the renders in Photoshop and added grain and some subtle dust texture overtop to make the piece feel a bit more ‘photorealistic’.