We’ve all seen countless candy and chocolate commercials on TV, and what a lot of people don’t know is that a lot of the food (chocolate, yogurt, milk, chips etc.) you see in these ads is created with software. After Effects is great for generating a flat surface (see below), and maya and Cinema4D are great for making dimensional liquid that actually interacts with other items in 3D space. Sometimes they also use a program called RealFlow to simulate liquids.
Anyway, I thought I’d give it a try. Here I created a simple golden-brown scene with the letters “Milk Chocolate” emerging from the pool.
I started by creating a solid layer and used Fractal Noise to generate generic grey values. I didn’t want to make it have to much contrast, because that could make my Caustics effect (in the main comp) bottom out and have big flat spots
Then I jumped over to Cinema4D and typed “Milk Chocolate” and extruded them. I Used a font called Memphis Extra Bold
After setting up the extrusion, I placed that inside a Subdivider NURBS so the letters could have a round gooey quality. Be warned, this will slow down your computer, so be careful
After adding a 50mm camera and a couple lights, and creating a brownish material for the text, then it was a matter of fine-tuning light positions
A quick render, using 2 frontal lights
Back in After Effects, I duplicated the text layer, colored it brown, changed its blending mode to Multiply, shifted it to the right and down, and then I used an effect called Displacement Map to give the illusion that it is sitting on top of the chocolate surface
