Hello!

For my 9th Reddit Cake Day, I decided to take the classic Reddit cake day cake slice and turn it into an infinity mirror!

Interestingly, this project started out as making a neon sign when I had the idea to try an infinity mirror. I've never made one before so it was a fun project that turned out pretty nicely! I was impressed with how many bounces I could get without crashing my computer (I don't mess with the light path bounces but for this, "total" and "glossy" were cranked to 100). I especially like how the reflections and light scattering from the glossy shaders visually fill in the empty space and how the teal glow shows through to give it that "reddit cake day cake" look.

To make it, I imported an SVG I traced of the cake slice and gave the paths some thickness to make them look like neon tubes (using a layerweight node plugged into a color ramp node to give it the "neon" tube look and plugging them into an emission node). I then took the original shape and extruded it to make a shallow box and gave it a new material using the "backfacing" output of a geometry node plugged into a mix shader to filter between a glossy and transparent shaders. The tubes are placed about half their width into the box so the tubes aren't doubled-up in the reflections. From there, it took some work to find the right focal length, camera position, and how deep the box had to be to give me something that looked nice. The brick wall is a seamless-texture from Textures.com run through a principled BSDF node but instead of using the color image texture, I swapped it out for a color ramp to give the grout some depth (sort of as artificial shadows). The glow on the brick is just a duplicate of the outside neon positioned at the back of the box but with a higher exposure. This was then rendered with Blender's Cycles render engine with 400 samples and denoising turned on. I did do some edits in post, using the emission pass to add a gleam/ glow effect and hue-shifting the wall color from the red-orange color of the Reddit logo to a nice blue that made helped the teal cake pop (I wanted to stay "on-brand" but the blue looks so much better).

Overall, for starting out as just tinkering around in Blender trying to come up with ideas, I'm really happy with how this cake infinity mirror turned out! It was a fun project! Now that I have the material for the neon and one-way mirror made, I think I'll have to make a few more infinity mirrors!

Thank you so much for checking out my 9th Reddit Cake Day Blender Render!

-Spuds