For the third week of our 3D Digital Literacy class, the tasks that we got were to create a milkshake and a flower in a vase.
For the milkshake, I started with creating the lid shape for the cup. I created a sphere and got rid of the bottom half of it, and then got rid of some of the faces at the top too, so it looked lids for milkshakes that have holes at the top. Then I selected the lower edges of that shape and extruded them down, and scaled the edges down at the bottom. then I filled those edges by extruding and scaling the faces inwards, and merging at centre. After bevelling the edges, I was left with a nice general cup shape!
However, I wanted to separate the lid from the cup itself, so of course I duplicated and separated it. I added a solidify modifier to the lid and to the cup as well, having selected it both, and then holding down ALT I adjusted the thickness, allowing both the cup and the lid to be modified at the same time. I shaded them both smooth and auto smooth.
Finally, I added loop cuts to the bottom of the lid and the top of the cup and extruded those faces in order to give off a more cup-like look, and bevelled the edges so everything looked smoother.
Next, I wanted to work on the actual drink inside the cup. I did a loop cut inside the cup, selected the faces up to that loop cut, and duplicated and separated them. Then I selected the top edge, and extruded and scaled it inwards multiple times, not just once, so there would be more edges/vertices, and merged at centre.
Creating more vertices allowed me to more easily manipulate them in order to make the drink look more drink-like! However, if you manipulated the verts normally by simply moving them, this normally wouldn’t have the ideal effect in this scenario – therefore, I turned on proportional editing. I had a little bit of difficulty with proportional editing at first as when you turn it on, a circle appears which represents how much of the area you’re editing, but I couldn’t see this at all. However, this was quickly solved when I realised that I was just relatively zoomed in, so the circle was so massive that it didn’t even show.
After this, though, I got it working well and moved the verts around so that the liquid looked more, well, liquid-like. I didn’t want to move the vertices too much, though, because to me it didn’t make sense for the drink to be all over the place when it was pretty stationary. Therefore I moved them around enough to not be completely flat, but still communicate some sort of fluidity. I also added an extra subdivision modifier onto this, which gave a nice, more fluid effect!
The sticker was pretty straightforward to make – I just added some loop cuts on the cup, duplicated and separated the faces. Then I added a solidify modifier, and after applying this, I was able to bevel the edges a little bit so they looked a tad smoother.
The straw was a little bit trickier. I made it from a Bezier curve, although I found it a little tricky to adjust to the exact shape that I wanted, but I suppose that comes with more practice and experience. However I extruded from it to give the shape more precision, and once I was happy enough with the shape, I went to the curve options and adjusted the depth so that the straw actually had some thickness now as opposed to just being a line. I then added a solidify modifier and converted the object into a mesh, which automatically applied the modifier and made it much easier to edit the mesh how I needed to.
I had a little bit of trouble with this, but I went on to try to do the straw bends. The way I did this was by adding loop cuts to the mesh, selecting every second loop and scaling them out. Since I was having a bit of trouble trying to make this exactly the way I wanted it to look, I decided to go for just three bends in the straw. Then I bevelled the edges so they didn’t seem as sharp as usual, and once I was happy enough with that, I went on to applying the materials.
In order to create the texture shown above, what I did was adjusted the base colour to a pale blue, and in the material settings, I changed the Blend Mode to Alpha Blend, and the Shadow Mode to Alpha Hashed, and turned down the Alpha in the regular material settings, creating a transparent effect! I also turned down the roughness so that the cup looked shinier and more plastic.
As for the liquid in the cup, I added the base colour and then dragged and dropped that base colour down to Emission, and adjusted the emission strength so that it gave off a very subtle yellow glow – I really like how this ended up looking inside the cup!
Colouring the sticker and the straw was pretty straight-forward. All I really had to do was select materials for them, and for the straw I simply selected some of the faces and applied a different colour to them! I really like the final colour scheme that I went for, and I think the pastel yellow, pink and blue go together very nicely.
Here is my render of the milkshake done using Cycles! I really like how it turned out, although in hindsight I think if I were to redo this I would give it a bit of a darker background to contrast against the softer colours of the model.
Next, I moved onto working on the model of the flower in the vase, starting with creating the actual vase.
I started by creating a sphere and extruding and scaling the edges until I ended up with this shape! I also bevelled some of the edges to make the shape a little rounder.
Then, for the flower, I started off by creating a sphere and then for the petal I took some of the faces, duplicated and separated them. I moved its origin down to the bottom of the sphere so that it would be easier to adjust the petal around the main part of the flower if needed.
I added solidify and subdivision surface modifiers to the petal and this made the shape a lot more petal-like! Through extruding the petal and scaling it on either side I managed to get it to look like more of a petal shape. Near the top of the petal it seemed to create this odd sort of shape but thankfully it worked because it actually makes it look a little more petal-like in my opinion!
I duplicated and separated the petals and tilted each other petal slightly to give it a nicer shape. I also adjusted the middle of the flower in order to look more like a pistil. With that I was pretty happy with how the flower was turning out.
Then I went on to making the actual stem of the flower. I did this by creating a Bezier curve, extruding them and bending it into place. I had a little bit of trouble with this but overall I think the shape ended up okay in the end.
I tried to curve it in different directions so that it looked a little more natural too. I also did the same thing as with the milkshake straw and adjusted the depth in the curve options, then added a solidify modifier!
I merged the whole flower part into one object and moved its origin down to the bottom so that it made a little easier to adjust it into place, and then put it at the end of the straw! All I needed to do now was add some leaves.
(Initial attempts – first I realised that I didn’t need the extra stem part at the bottom, and then I realised that I still had some ngons)
To create the leaf I took a plane and used the knife tool to cut out a leaf shape, and deleted the unneeded faces from the rest of the plane. Then I inset the face of it and started cutting into the shape to make sure the shape was made of quads and not ngons. Admittedly though, the first time I was following along I missed the point and I wasn’t sure what the point was of cutting inside the shape, but looking back I realised that the reason we were cutting it was to get rid of any ngon shapes in the leaf! After realising this, I went back into edit mode and fixed that up.
Then after adjusting the leaves into place, I was done with my model! Now all I had to do was add some materials and render everything.
I decided to go for another sort of softer, pinker colour scheme which I ended up liking!
And here is my render of the flower using the Cycles engine! I honestly love how this turned out and I really like the colours that I used, I think they ended up working together very nicely!
In the end I’m super happy with how both the milkshake and the flower in the vase turned out. If I were to redo them I think I would have tried to tackle the straw again and see if I could shape it better, however overall I really like how they both look! I learnt a lot about using Bezier curves some more, and creating some more interesting looking shapes like straws, petals and leaves, and I also learnt about how to use the knife tool. Overall, I found both of these projects very interesting to do and they taught me a lot!