Quarter Pound
A shader library for soft goods — crumb, crust, glaze — weighed by eye until the light pass stopped arguing.
- Client
- Field & Ferment
- Discipline
- Surface study
- Year
- 2026
Food is the hardest thing we render, and bread is the hardest food. It is translucent where you do not expect it, matte and glossy within a centimetre of itself, and everyone looking at the render has held one.
Twelve surfaces, one rig
Field & Ferment needed a library rather than a hero: crumb, crust, glaze, flour dust, seed, and the six in-between states a loaf passes through in an oven. Each one had to hold up under the same light so a range shot would not look assembled.
Subsurface, sparingly
The temptation with anything organic is to push subsurface scattering until it glows. Bread does not glow; it absorbs. We ended up with less scattering than any of us expected and solved the softness in the light rig instead — a big, low, warm key and a bounce card almost touching the crust.
Outcome
A look book the client’s own team now renders from, and a rig they have used on two ranges we had nothing to do with. That counts as the good outcome.