Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Model a Silver Goblet cylinder

Preliminaries

This is a version of "Model a Silver Goblet" but starting from a cylinder rather than a cube.

Start Blender or start a new scene ( Ctrl  +  X ) and delete the default cube.

Change to Top view ( Num7 ), make sure you're in Object mode and add a cylinder ( Shift  +  A  Mesh > Cylinder): in the popup menu, change the number of vertices from 32 to 16, the Radius from 1.000 to 1.800, the Depth from 2.000 to 0.100 and leave "Cap Ends" as it is.

Change to Front view ( Num1 ).

Description of the modeling steps

The steps in this tutorial are almost all made up of "extrude" and "scale": so, to avoid repeating key sequences every time,

extrude

means

1. make sure "Limit selection to visible" is off

   

   Shows "Limit selection to visible" icon

2. box select the top vertices of the cylinder: press  B , click and drag  LMB  to make a rectangle around the top vertices
3. press  E , press  Z  and type in the amount of the extrusion and press  Enter ; you can move the mouse instead but it is quicker and easier to type it in.

For example, the following keystroke sequence extrudes by 1.5:
 B , click and drag  LMB  to make a rectangle around the top vertices;  E  Z  1  .  5  Enter .

scale

scaling is by default restricted to the X-Y plane; although the numbers in the bottom left corner of the 3Dview show Z changing, in fact only X and Y change, and by equal amounts.

1. press  S , type in the value and press  enter  — you can use the mouse instead but it is quicker and easier to type in the number.

Creating the Goblet

E-numbers and construction steps

This diagram shows the connection between the E-numbers and the goblet construction.

• E1: Deselect all vertices ( A ), Box-select the top vertices (B-key), and extrude by 0.2: you may need to zoom in ( SCROLL ) to do this as it's quite thin. Scale to 0.1.
• E2: Extrude by 0.2, scale by 2.
• E3: Extrude by 0.2, scale by 0.5 to make the lower knob.
• E4: Extrude by 4 to make the stem.
• E5: Extrude by 0.2, scale by 2.
• E6: Extrude by 0.2, scale by 0.5 to make the upper knob.
• E7: Extrude by 0.2, scale by 8 to make the base of the cup.
• E8: Extrude by 4, if you wish to make a flared cup, you can scale by 1.5.
• E9: Extrude by 0.0, scale by 0.9 to make the rim of the cup. (This will create a new ring of vertices and then move them in towards the centre.)

  Now go into Wireframe mode ( Z ) so you can see inside to guide the next few steps.

• E10: Extrude by -3.9, that is, downwards. and scale by 0.69: you can do this last scaling with the mouse, if you like, to get the edges of the inside of the cup and the outside parallel.
• E11: Extrude by 0.0, scale by 0.0 to make the inside of the cup. Press  W  Remove Doubles to merge the centre vertexes.

You now have a goblet, the base of the inside of the cup is the face of the last extrusion, is circular and flat as it derives from a cylinder.

If you haven't already saved your work-in-progress, now would be a good time.

Subsurfing and smoothing the goblet

The last step is to subsurf and smooth: go into Object mode and enable Solid mode again ( Z ).

Select the Editing panel from the Buttons window ( F9 ) and, in the "Modifiers" panel, click on "Add Modifier", select "Subdivision Surface" from the popup menu and, in the Subsurf display, increase "View subdivisions" from 1 to 2.

Shows the Editing panel icon and the Modifier panel

At the bottom right of the "Links and Materials" panel, click on the "Shading: Smooth" button. At the bottom of the cup you will see fluting — this is an artifact caused by smoothing and subsurfing triangles on a curved surface. Here it adds to the appearance, don't you think?

In Blender v2.78, the "Smooth" button is located in the "Tools" menu under the "Edit" tab.

Tools shading

Flattening the base of the goblet

The base of the goblet is curved due to the subsurfing, so needs to be flattened.

Go into Edit mode, deselect all, box-select the lowest set of vertices, then crease (remove the subsurfing) by pressing  Shift  +  E  then  1   enter .

The final result should look something like this:

Save the scene for use in the lighting tutorial. To jump to the relevant lighting section, go to Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Light a Silver Goblet