It is the rite of passage. If you’ve spent more than five minutes looking into 3D modeling, you’ve seen it. That pink-sprinkled, slightly shiny, digital pastry. Created by Andrew Price—better known as Blender Guru—the "Donut Tutorial" has become the unofficial entrance exam for the world of open-source CGI.
But why?
Honestly, it’s just a circle with a hole in it. Yet, learning how to make a donut in blender teaches you more about the logic of spatial mathematics and light physics than a semester in a traditional art class might. It’s accessible. It’s free. It’s also incredibly easy to mess up if you don’t understand how Blender thinks.
The software itself, Blender, used to be a nightmare of a UI. People hated it. Then came the 2.8 update, and suddenly, the barrier to entry collapsed. Now, in 2026, with the latest geometry nodes and cycles rendering improvements, the process is even more nuanced. You aren't just making a shape; you're simulating reality.
The Geometry of a Pastry
Start with a Torus. That’s the technical name for a donut shape. You hit Shift + A, mesh, Torus.
Here is where most beginners fail immediately: they don't look at the bottom left menu. If you click away before adjusting your major and minor segments, you’re stuck with whatever resolution Blender decided for you. You want enough detail so it looks round, but not so much that your computer starts sounding like a jet engine taking off.
Keep it simple.
Once you have the base, you enter Edit Mode. This is where the magic—and the frustration—happens. You’re no longer looking at an object; you’re looking at vertices, edges, and faces. To make it look like a real donut, you need imperfection. Real food isn't symmetrical. Use the Proportional Editing tool (O). When you move one dot, the others nearby follow like a ripple in a pond. Pull a few sections down. Push some in. Give it that "fried in a vat of oil" look.
Dealing with the Icing (and the Physics of "Shrinkwrap")
The icing is basically a duplicate of the top half of your donut. You select the top faces, hit Shift + D to duplicate, and P to separate it into its own object.
But icing has thickness.
This is where the Solidify modifier comes in. If you’ve ever wondered how to make a donut in blender look delicious rather than plastic, it’s all in the modifiers. You add thickness, but then you realize the icing is hovering over the dough like a ghost. You need the Shrinkwrap modifier to snap it back down, followed by some manual sculpting to create those iconic drips.
The drips are the hardest part for most people. You grab a vertex, pull it down, and suddenly the mesh clips through the donut. It looks broken. You have to use "Snapping" to make sure the icing stays glued to the surface of the bread. It's tedious work. It's also where you learn the most about how 3D surfaces interact.
The Sprinkle Problem and Geometry Nodes
Back in the day, we used Particle Systems for sprinkles. It was a mess. They would poke through the icing, or they would all point the same direction like a weird sprinkle army.
💡 You might also like: Why the Futuristic Sci Fi Spaceship is Harder to Design Than We Thought
Now, we use Geometry Nodes.
Geometry Nodes are basically a visual programming language inside Blender. It sounds terrifying. It kind of is, at first. But for a donut, it's just a way to tell Blender: "Take this small cylinder I made and scatter it randomly over the top of the icing, but only where I’ve painted a weight map."
- Create a small cylinder.
- Give it rounded ends (Subdivision Surface is your friend here).
- Use a "Distribute Points on Faces" node.
- Use an "Instance on Points" node.
Suddenly, you have thousands of sprinkles. If your computer freezes, you probably set the density too high. Lower it.
Why Texture Matters More Than Geometry
You can have a perfect model, but if the material looks like gray clay, nobody wants to eat it. This brings us to the Shader Editor.
The "Principled BSDF" is the king of nodes. For the donut, you need "Subsurface Scattering" (SSS). Real dough lets a little bit of light pass through the surface before it bounces back out. That’s why a candle looks warm when lit or why your ears turn red when the sun is behind you. Without SSS, your donut looks like painted wood.
For the icing, you want high Specular and low Roughness. It needs to look wet. It needs to reflect the world around it.
The Lighting Trap
You’ve spent four hours on the mesh. You’ve spent two hours on the sprinkles. You hit render, and it looks... okay.
It’s usually the lighting.
Most people just use the default point light. Don't do that. Use a three-point lighting setup: a Key light (bright, off to the side), a Fill light (dimmer, on the other side), and a Rim light (behind the donut to give it a glowing edge). This separates the object from the background.
Blender’s Cycles engine is a path-tracer. It calculates individual rays of light. In 2026, this is faster than ever, but it still requires a decent GPU. If you’re on a laptop, Eevee is a great real-time alternative, though you lose some of that tasty light refraction in the icing.
Common Mistakes People Make
- Too many polygons: Your donut doesn't need 4 million triangles. It’s a snack, not a NASA simulation.
- Ignoring Scale: If your donut is 50 meters wide in the Blender coordinate system, the physics and lights won't behave correctly. Hit
N, check the dimensions. It should be about 10cm. - Perfectly straight sprinkles: Use a Random Value node to jitter the rotation. Nature loves chaos.
- Forgetting the "Gap": Real icing sits on top of the donut. If it’s perfectly flush, it looks fake. Give it a tiny bit of offset.
What Next?
Once you've finished the tutorial, the worst thing you can do is stop. The "Donut" is a foundation, not a career.
Take these specific steps to move beyond the pastry:
- Deconstruct the Nodes: Go back into the Geometry Nodes setup you built for the sprinkles. Try to swap the sprinkles for something else, like grass on a plane or rocks on a mountain. The logic is identical.
- Animate the Camera: Don't just take a still photo. Use the "Graph Editor" to create a smooth 360-degree spin. This teaches you about keyframes and interpolation—the bread and butter of motion graphics.
- Attempt an "Organic" Object: Donuts are semi-geometric. Try modeling a piece of fruit next. A pear or an apple requires more sculpting and more complex texturing (procedural skin textures).
- Join a Community: Upload your render to the Blender subreddit or a Discord server. Be prepared for "donut fatigue" jokes, but listen to the critiques on your lighting. That’s where the real growth happens.
The goal isn't to be the person who made a donut. The goal is to be the person who understood why the donut worked and applied that to something original. 3D art is 10% software knowledge and 90% observing how light hits the real world. Keep looking at things. Keep rendering.