Orange mug

Let's start with the mug, shall we?

Out of the four projects I have finished so far, this is the oldest one. It is a cup I use every day - although I have to admit that most of the time it is not nearly as pristine as the one I created in Blender.

Which is incidentally its first flaw. When you create things in Blender, they look perfect - too perfect, in fact. If I knew how to do it, I would have added stains and darker coloring to the inside of the cup. But as it happened, I didn't know how (and I still don't, really).

Another thing I struggled with was the actual shape of the mug - and especially the handle. The mug I managed to make decent-looking after some intense tweaking, but the handle still looks bumpy in its lower section. It bugged me so much that when I rendered what I thought was the final image, I went to bed, only to get up early next morning and start working on it again. It was worth the effort in the end but I would have never guessed that something so simple can take so much time.

What I'm quite happy with, on the other hand, is the colours. The orange is almost spot on, and the green seems to complement it quite nicely. No gradient is used on the desk, it is a solid green made to look this way by adjusting the lights and using black background.

Speaking of lights, they were a lot of fun - if your idea of fun involves hours of careful repositioning of emission planes and spot lamps, followed by sessions of dumbfounded exasperation because the damned thing looks different when it shouldn't and doesn't change a bit when you rework half of the scene. I specifically wanted to catch a bit of glare on the handle, but adjusting the light angle to be just right proved almost impossible. I reckon it took me a great deal longer than the actual modelling.

Before I started working on it, I thought the hardest part would be the logos. As it turned out, they were relatively easy to do. A minor hindrance was applying the colours on the inside logo. First, I coloured each bar separately. Then I grouped them so that I could use them as a single object. So far so good. But when I merged them with the cup they lost their individual colours - so I had to go in and reapply all of them. In the hindsight that seems like reasonable behavior on Blender's part, but I was less than enthusiastic about having to do that whole thing again.

This about sums up the pitfalls I didn't avoid and the misskates I made when creating my first individual project in Blender. Next time I will show you how I thought I knew how to make a lamp shining through a dark room, until I found out I couldn't (quite).