I decided to create a Blender 3D still life scene but couldn’t decide what to do. This is the end result. My wife and I didn’t get a wedding cake. We didn’t do the funky chicken, there was no bouquet tossing. There was a bouquet, an absurdly beautiful one designed and generously gifted by my wife’s cousin (no site yet), but it wasn’t tossed. Nothing borrowed or blue. A lot of what we did reflected our philosophy on what our wedding should be like. We’ve been to many fun, traditional weddings and terrific “off-beat” weddings but neither seemed the right fit for us.
Plus, weddings are a racket. My wife wrote a great blog entry to that effect. Do read, she’s not dull. Specifically, she talks about the inflated expectations of publications who say that the average American wedding costs $27,000. Your engagement ring should cost (and you didn’t even need to read because you know that the answer is) three months salary, says the commercial by the people who sell elemental carbon at outrageous prices. Reality shows revolving around weddings are starting to put bugs in people’s ears that they should ideally buy two wedding dresses, one for the ceremony and one for the reception. Take your Gallant Gallstone and shove it, oh thou media ne’er-do-wells with agendas.
Businesses see the affianced coming their way and they see dollar signs and dunce caps. We checked out many excellent Portland bakeries, many of which had marvelous and reasonably priced multi-layered cakes for events… until you dropped the word “wedding.” Then suddenly, the price of fondant and flour quadrupled, or they simply pulled out that juicy “contact us to get a quote!” nugget that means “you gon’ get ripped off, sucka!” Forget about giant diamonds and all that. Our rings both cost less than the price of a good night out; instead of making the diamond dealers a little richer, we blew our coin on a trip to Paris and had several good nights out. The wedding dress was beautiful and I won’t tell you where it came from but it was very affordable and there was one of them.
We kept it simple and the simplicity paid off in dividends. We spent the bulk of our money feeding and watering our wedding guests. The dinner was at Simpatica Catering and Dining Hall. Our friend Jacob Grier designed two wedding punches that reflected our cultural backgrounds, one with gin and the other with Cazadores Blanco tequila, distilled in my grandparents’ home town of Arandas, Jalisco (the bottles were a gift from my brother Alex and his wife Evy). Oh, and music! We went all out in that respect. There was a professional string duo who played some good classical selections and the post wedding song was my wife’s favorite song, Postcards from Italy by Beirut, arranged by my little brother Daniel. No DJ, just some good tunes on an iPod Mini over the restaurant’s speaker system.
A great night, to be sure. But no wedding cake! I wondered what we might like to have if we’d have had one. Here’s the end result, which is something simple, improbably tall and covered in fondant. The only things I didn’t make were the wallpaper and the design on the cake. Those came from DeviantArt and were free to use without attribution so I didn’t jot those authors down. But I think it came out nice. This rendered for about 30 hours, the reason being that the light going through the curtain was very grainy and it took some time to clean up.
The tablecloth was my first attempt at draping a cloth material over a solid object. You’re supposed to animate a flat cloth falling over a solid object, in this case the table, then let Blender do its thing for a couple of hours. The ideal result is that you see a nice animation of a table-cloth falling on the table top, billowing back and forth a bit and then it settles in to place. I set the animation at a 1000 frames since I was going to bed and had lots of time for the animation to do its thing. I really wanted to see it hit frame 1000 and then be perfectly still on the table.
The next morning, I took my coffee downstairs to my office to see my handiwork. It didn’t work as I’d intended. I forgot to give the tablecloth material and the table some “grip” in the physics settings so the result was an animation of the cloth hitting the table, billowing and snapping back once and then sliding off the table completely. It fell for 900 frames straight down through the floor along and into Z-axis oblivion. It was kind of funny.
Comments/criticisms welcome.