Liquid Glass

Did you ever see the movie The Abyss? It came out in 1989, was directed by James Cameron (of Avatar fame), and starred Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. It had a cool liquid effect of a creature that was pure water, and could form the water into any shape it desired, even mimicing Mary Elizabeth's face.

Blender has a very useful object called lattices. They are just a 3D array of points, in an empty cube. You can move any of the points around, which deforms the overall shape so its not a cube anymore. The tricky part is you can take any other object, and modify it with the lattice, which deforms the shape of that object in the same way the lattice is deformed. If you look at the animation below, you will see a sphere that changes shape, being deformed by the invisible lattice. The lattice is not actually changing shape, its just moving through and around the sphere.

Plus I was able to make the sphere semi-transparent. As it stretches, you can see the back of the sphere visible through the middle. It gives a really cool watery, glassy effect.

Click to see video

The animation took 37 minutes to render, but quite a bit longer to get just the right material. It has 3 textures on it, clouds, a blend, and marble. And of course I had to turn on ray-tracing to get the transparency. It can also be viewed as a looping video. James Cameron would be happy to see the progress I am making in my lessons.

Jeep

Now its time to do something a little more complex. Something that has several parts to it, rather than just one. Start with some wheels (tires plus hubcaps), vaguely bucket seats, a chassis, and a windscreen. Add a somewhat unusual accessory for the average office worker, a rocket launcher, and you have the perfect start for a jeep. Don't forget some spare ammo. After shooting off one rocket launcher, the next thing you obviously want to do is to do it again. And a few more times. Boom baby!

The tire treads were interesting to make, the hubcaps pretty easy. The seats were again based on cubes, rounded around the edges, with some seams added in. And the body of course is cube-based, but took a lot of steps to make it into a full chassis. And added a small bevel on all the edges so it didn't look quite so blocky. The windscreen is probably a bit too reflective, way to glarey for actual driving in any sort of safe manner. Then again, with a rocket launcher on the back, safety is not exactly a high priority.

You could spend ages on something like this, adding all the details that would make it more realistic. A spare tire on the back, grill on the front, head-lights, tail-lights, steering wheel, rear-view mirrors, fenders, roll-cage, or sorts of stuff. But then who has that sort of time? I settled with adding sights on the launcher.

Glass Goblet

If a piglet is a small pig, and a droplet is a small drop, I guess a goblet is a small gob. Which is British and Australian slang for "mouth". So maybe you need a small mouth to drink from a goblet.

Amazingly, you can start with a cube in Blender, and end up with no straight lines anywhere. It has this thing called sub-surfaces. You give it a cube with 6 faces, tell it to sub-surface, and it turns each face into 4 faces. Which arrange themselves to halve the angles between the faces, so you end up with something rounder. Which sounds like the result after eating at McDonalds for too long.

If you sub-surface to level 2, you get each of the sub-surfaced faces sub-surfaced as well, so the 4 faces then becomes 16 faces. And you can sub-surface to level 3, 4, 5, etc. Each time the result is smoother than before.

Each part of this goblet was a cube, or something vaguely cubish (not cubist, that's those crazy painters from last century like Picaso). The stem and part you drink from was a very tall tube (or a "skinny" one if you don't mind being politically incorrect).

Ray-tracing comes in handy here again, not this time for reflections but for refractions. Like when you throw a spear into a lake to catch the fish but it misses by six inches cause the light has been bent. Until you adapt and aim 6 inches away from the fish. Clever human.

The base looks a bit too small, but I think that's an optical illusion from the perspective. In Blender you can view the scene in Orthogonal (straight-on) or Perspective mode, where things closer to you look bigger. Like that exam you haven't studied for tomorrow.