250 Frames of Delicious Chocolate
Created with a laptop & GridMarkets.
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Gianni Ritschard is a freelance 3D artist and 2D character designer based in Winterthur, Switzerland, with over nine years of professional experience in both studio and freelance environments.
As a versatile 3D generalist with a focus on food and small scale liquid simulations , he has worked across the entire CGI production pipeline, from previsualization and asset creation (modeling, sculpting, UV unwrapping, shading, and texturing) to scene assembly, lighting, visual effects (fluid, smoke, and rigid body simulations) and rendering. His portfolio spans cartoon-style short films, CGI commercials, and photorealistic product visualizations for TV and social media.
In recent years, Gianni has rediscovered his passion for character design and storytelling, refining his craft under the guidance of top instructors at CGMA and beyond. Since 2021, he has also been offering 2D character design services, blending his deep technical expertise with a strong artistic vision.
The Project
In this project we wanted to showcase the microdetails on the almond scan we made for creative crops, a high end 3d food scan store I've co-founded together with another artist.
I am a huge fan of everything chocolate, so this project was a really fun opportunity for me to integrate that into my cg work.
At the beginning while developing the shots, I looked at a lot of footage of food commercials. There was one shot that particularly stuck with me of a strawberry overflowed by chocolate upside down by amazing french director Michael Roulier. A must see for every artist in the food industry in my opinion, who's work in general heavily inspired the project.
When I began to work on the simulation I stumbled on a topic that I've not been confronted with before, which is surface adhesion (the force that makes water droplets stick to a surface, or run along the surface seemingly defying gravity).
I then found this awesome tutorial by Berika Lobzhanidze, thank you for that! The approach is very straight forward and smart. In short he scatters points on a surface, inverts the normals so they point inwards and uses that vector to adjust the velocities of the particles in the sim, which results in them moving towards the surface of the object.
I have used that approach in many projects since then. The only downside I have found is that it seems to affect the simulation speed quite a bit with high particle counts on viscous liquids, so I'm currently testing a volume based approach to see if that could be more efficient.
The biggest challenge was the antigravity droplets shot. It took a lot of experimentation to find a method to efficiently art direct the droplets, how fast they separate from the main liquid and in what order the go off the almond into the air.
I ended up using a custom field that controls a stick on collision force. With that I could slow down the liquid in certain areas, which would then cause the liquid that is not slowed down to form droplets. In addition to that I placed a couple of extra emitters (small spheres) with different initial velocities that would create additional droplets in exactly the speed and place where I needed them to be.
by Gianni Ritschard - Feb 2025
Kittiya is the Co Founder of creative crops and has made the almond scan in the project.
She has started her career in 3d architectural visualization, has then worked full time on creative crops for a while.
After that she has supported me in my projects and also spent a lot of time doing photography, which has been a lifelong passion to her.
Gianni's Passion: Family, Travel, and Work
Gianni has always been passionate about three things: his family, traveling, and his work.
Thanks to remote work, a reliable internet connection, and GridMarkets, he can seamlessly combine all three. With just a laptop, he creates stunning visuals from anywhere in the world—whether at home with his family or on the move exploring new places.
1- Lisbon, Portugal: We found this awesome hidden beach near Lisbon, where we've been twice for almost a year in total.
2- Paris: When we lived in Paris for the first time we were lucky enough to have this view from our apartment.
3- Budapest: A beautiful spot we loved to relax in our free time while we lived in Budapest, Hungary
4- NYC, USA: On the way home after bringing our older daughter to daycare in our neighborhood in Williamsburg, NYC.
5- Bangkok: I was surprised to find this super old Flyer with Arnold Schwarzenegger during a walk in the streets of Bangkok.
6- Thailand, countryside: After work drive to the neighboring rice fields in the countryside of northern Thailand
7- Seoul: I loved walking through the part of Seoul we've lived in, because it was full of these amazing, traditional buildings.
8- Iceland: We've seen this stunning waterfall during on of our weekend trips after work when we were in Iceland for almost 2 months.
9- Oberhofen castle, Switzerland: We've lived in an apartment basically next to this castle at the lake. We had quit our apartment in 2020 to start traveling in Asia, only to have all of our plans canceled because of Covid right after that.
Luckily we had family members who owned a house in a small town in Switzerland which they didn't live in full time, so our first stop was actually in Switzerland.
Credit: Kittiya Khundan and Gianni Ritschard
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StoryBoard
The liquid chocolate was created using houdini's flip solver.
The emitter movement and getting the right viscosity was key to have a little bit of layering without loosing the liquid character of the chocolate.
A strong light source from the side helps accentuate the details of the almond scan.
A custom adhesion force and a stick on collision field where used to art direct the anti gravity droplets.
High particle reseeding helped to smooth out the chocolate.
Almond Scan
Front view render of the almond scan, retopologized model with displacement
Side view render, retopologized model with displacement
Top view render, retopologized model with displacement
Clay render with displacement, overlay of wireframe of the lowres model
Having that lowres version with displacement is really handy as it allows for a fast preview in the viewport without the need of a lowres proxy or losing detail in the final render.
Lowres model without displacement, showing the Uvs
A tiny fraction of the 8K Diffuse map in full resolution, showing the amount of detail in the scanned texture.
Breakdown
Surface
Final mesh of the chocolate surface, after meshing the particles and adding a little bit of smoothing
Particles
Final flip particles with velocity visualization, around 4M particles
Flip particles
Final flip particles with velocity visualization, around 3M particles
Conclusion
GridMarkets made the rendering process incredibly smooth and efficient. The seamless integration with Houdini felt almost like submitting a job to a local render farm, with file uploads no longer being a concern thanks to a good internet connection.
As someone who moves to a new country every few months, owning a high-performance rendering machine isn’t practical. Having on-demand access to powerful rendering and simulation resources has been a game-changer.
I can work entirely from my laptop—creating shots, setting up lighting and shading—and when it’s time to render or handle heavy simulations, I can effortlessly submit them to GridMarkets.
For this project, I refined a shot, submitted a preview render to the cloud, and downloaded the frames shortly after—all while my laptop remained free to work on the next shot.
This not only saved me time but also prevented my laptop from overheating during GPU rendering, especially in the summer!
Beyond the performance, the fast and responsive support was invaluable. Even when I didn’t mark a question as urgent, I always received quick and helpful replies.
While I used only 1–5 machines for this project, it’s reassuring to know that scaling up is always an option when deadlines are tight.
Additionally, for my current project, I’ve started running simulations in the cloud, allowing me to test multiple iterations simultaneously while keeping my laptop free for the next task.
GridMarkets has truly streamlined my workflow, making high-quality rendering and simulations accessible from anywhere in the world.
By: GridMarkets marketing