Tutorials3D GraphicsBlender 3DBlender 3D: How to model a wine glass

Blender 3D: How to model a wine glass

Written by Marc Roberge | 27 January 2010

In this tutorial, we will see how to use the spin tool to model a wine glass in Blender 3D. We will also see how to create a glass material for rendering.

Launch Blender 3D. Press “7” on your NumPad to ensure you are in top view. Delete the default cube by pressing “X” and “Enter”.

We are going to add a circle mesh as a starting point for our wine glass profile. To add a mesh, press your space bar once. From the menu that appears, select “Add>Mesh>Circle”.

Your 16 vertices circle is added to your Blender scene. Press the “Tab” key to jump from “Object Mode” to “Edit Mode”.

Press “A” once to deselect all vertices.

Press “B” once to enable box selection. Drag a rectangular selection over the 7 vertices on the right of your circle.

Press “X” to delete and from the “Erase” menu, choose “Vertices”.

Now, we need to start creating our wine glass profile. We’ll start by moving vertices around and will add vertices as needed. To move a vertice, first right click on the vertice to select it and then press “G”. Move your mouse pointer, the vertice will follow your mouse, and simply left click where you want to place it. Move the vertices in order to get something like the following.

This gives us a rough profile of the wine glass’ bowl.

Right click on the bottom most vertice to select it. Press “E” to extrude and move your mouse pointer to where you want to place the next vertice. Repeat this process all the way down, trying to create an outline of the stem and foot of the glass, like this. Make sure that the last vertice stops at the green line (Y axis). Do not go past this line as it will be the axis of rotation upon which we will spin our profile to create the glass.

Once you’ve made it all the way down to the foot, we will work on the top of the glass.

Right click the top most vertice to select it. Using the same technique we used in step 9 (“E” to extrude), complete the profile of the bowl. It should look like this:

The reason we are doubling this part of the profile is to give the glass the appearance of “thickness”.

Select all vertices by pressing “A” and change your view to front view by pressing “1” on the NumPad. You will now see something like this:

Press “F9” to show your “Editing” panels. From the “Mesh Tools” panel, change the value for degrees “Degr:” beneath the “Spin” button to 360 and then press the “Spin” button.

You will get the following.

To view your object in free rotate mode, with your pointer hovering over your glass, click and hold the scroll wheel button on your mouse. Moving your mouse will free rotate your object.

Before we proceed, we want to remove any extraneous or duplicate vertices. This will prevent us from having unsightly seams in our model when we render it. To remove doubles, press “A” once to deselect all and a second time to select all vertices.

Press “W”. This opens the “Specials” menu. From this menu, select “Remove Doubles”.

Now we can add and edit a material to apply to our glass model. Press “F5” to show the “Materials” panels. From the “Links and Pipeline” panel, click “Add New”.

From the “Material” panel, reduce the Alpha (A) to zero. From the “Mirror Trans” panel, toggle the “Ray Transp” button and increase the Index of Refraction (IOR) to between 1.50 and 1.70. The Alpha adjustment makes your applied material transparent. The IOR applies light refraction, making your model distort light much like it would in the physical world.

Press “F9” to show the “Editing” panels. From the “Link and Material” panel, click the “Set Smooth” button.

Over to the right, from the “Modifiers” panel, click “Add Modifier” and select “Subsurf” from the pop up menu.

Go back to the Shading panels (F5). Click on the “Shaders” Tab and toggle the “Tra Shado”(Transparent Shadow) button.

Press “F12” to render your model. You might not see much seeing as your glass is “transparent” and the world color is blue by default. However, Once you add a few items to your scene, change the world color and add a light source or two, your glass should look like this:

Change the number of vertices to 16 and click “OK”.