Gunther

Gunther shows an empty glass and a donut on a plate placed on a table in front of a wall.
It was created by myself using Blender 3.4 and consists of 60272 primitives.
On my computer, the tumbnail took 8.8 minutes and the final image 2 hours and 24 sminutes with 30 samples per pixel to render.

Below I will briefly discuss each part of my scene.

-The Donut:
the concept of the donut, as well as the icing and sprincles comes from Andrew Price's youtube playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjEaoINr3zgFX8ZsChQVQsuDSjEqdWMAD.
It is made of 6912 triangles and its Lambertian material is uniform brown.
It did receive minimal changes from the initial mesh, the Torus,
which mainly focused on flattening and adding bumps.

-The Icing:
the icing was created by first copying the top half of the donut. Then the "Solidify" and "Subdivide" modifiers were used to give it volume.
For the material, I used the Combinematerial made of Lambertian and Phong.
It consists of 14208 triangles.

-The Sprincles:
for the sprincles, I created three small layouts, one consisting of 16 triangles and the other two of 26 triangles, which I instanced using geometry nodes in Blender and exporting the resulting objects.
To separate them, I reimported them back into Blender, where they were automatically separated, before exporting them again in four batches, for each of which I created a CombineMaterial with a
Phong and LambertianMaterial in their respective colors (green, light blue, red, pink).
The first three colors were chosen by a quick poll of four people who were tasked with imagining a donut with white icing and sprincles.
The fourth color is a holdover from when I had not divided the sprincles into subgroups.
as In my eyes the best uniform color for sprincles on white icing is pink.
In total they have 8430 triangles.

-The Glass:
I created the glass by hollowing out a cylinder, creating a smaller circular face on top, and dragging it down.
It uses the Dielectric Material with an eta of 1.55 and has a total of 14848 triangles.
I initially planned to fill the glass with a liquid, but decided against it due to several problems arising from the interaction between the two objects as well as the rendering time.

-The Plate:
The plate was constructed by filling a circle and extruding, scaling, and moving the outer edge multiple times.
It consists of 15872 triangles, with a white Lambertian material.
The newly added material Paperplate is a simple Lambertian material that reflects light on both sides of the primitive, as I had trouble getting the normals to line up correctly.

-The Table:
The table is made from a single quad
The texture was taken from https://architextures.org/textures/729 with repetition as borderhandeling and nearest-neighbor interpolation.
I used a PlaneMapper to stretch it across the table, since the image itself was too small to show the wooden features I wanted for the table.

-The Wall:
The wall is also made from a quad and closes off the scene to the back.
The texture was taken from https://architextures.org/textures/1086 with repetition and bilinear interpolation.
It is meant to represent a rougher wallpaper.
No texturemapper was used because I did not want to represent the actual content of the image, but rather some sort of ordered roughness.

Besides the objects, the scene consists of a 'Perspective Camera' and a 'Directional Light'.

The idea:

The idea for the first take on this scene came around Christmas time.
At that time the rough idea consisted of cookies and a glass of milk with maybe a small fir branch in front of it.
As time went on, I thought about using a glass rather than a cup, since glass would certainly look much cooler as a material.
But then the milk had to go because I cannot endure the tough of pouring milk into a glass.
Once the milk was gone and I saw Andrew Price's donut tutorial from Andrew Price, I replaced the cookies with a donut because I did not want to follow the Christmas theme.
For that reason, I also no longer saw any reason in the pine branch.
The only thing left from the original idea is the plate, as I would have also used a much darker wood type for the table.