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  "publishedAt": "2026-04-04T11:12:30.000Z",
  "site": "https://hexbear.net",
  "tags": [
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  "textContent": "submitted by FOSSing to art\n23 points | 3 comments\n\n\nHello and welcome to my first tutorial!\n\nFor this tutorial we’ll model a simple coffee mug and throw a basic material on it. The coffee mug is a classic for practicing basic modeling, as well as giving us a look at _modifiers_ , which are an extremely useful aspect of Blender that you will benefit from getting the hang of early.\n\nSome of the reference photos will have to be uploaded in a separate reply of mine to this same post, so as to avoid crashing my browser when I try to post this, so wait a moment for that reply comment if you especially need the visual reference.\n\nVERSION INFO:\n\nEverything featured in this tutorial can be done with Blender 2.8 and up (I personally used Blender 3.6.9). Realistically you could do it on Blender 2.79 as well (I have not used versions older than 2.79 and cannot comment on them), but 2.8 and onward is basically when Blender became professional-quality software, so preferably 2.8 is the oldest version you’d be using.\n\nINSTRUCTIONS:\n\n___NAVIGATING 3D VIEWPORT:\n\nspoiler\n\nWhenever you open a new scene in Blender, you will start in _Object Mode_ and you will have three objects in your scene: a default cube mesh, a light, and a camera. For now, let’s practice viewing the cube in 3D space. Select the cube object by clicking it with _LEFT_CLICK_ , and then press the “.” key (the one by the number-pad, not the normal period key) to focus on the cube object. This will not only snap your view to the selected object, but will also make it the focal point for subsequent viewport movements, such as rotating the viewport view around the cube by clicking the _MIDDLE_MOUSE_BUTTON_ and moving the mouse around. You can also zoom in our out by using the _MOUSE_WHEEL_ (for extra precise control you can use _ALT + MIDDLE_MOUSE_BUTTON_ and then move the mouse to adjust). You can move the viewport across or up and down (“panning”? is that the term?) by using _SHIFT + MIDDLE_MOUSE_CLICK_ and moving the mouse. When we are done practicing viewport movement, we can also practice scaling the cube sith the _S_ key (“S” for scale), rotate it with _R_ key (“R” for Rotate), and grab and move it with the _G_ key (“G” for Grab). Finally, we can select all of the objects by double tapping the _A_ key to select all (“A” for All), and then pressing the _X_ key to delete them, giving us a clear workspace.\n\n___THE MODELING:\n\nspoiler\n\n1) Press _SHIFT + A_ , move the cursor over “mesh” (the top option), then down to “cylinder” and select it with _LEFT_CLICK_ to spawn a cylinder. 2) After spawning the cylinder, you’ll notice a little option in the lower left-hand of the viewport you’re working in, which will say “Add Cylinder”. Click the “Add Cylinder” option that appears in the lower-left hand side of the screen and set “Vertices” value to 10.  3) With the cylinder object selected (as indicated by an orange-ish highlight around the object), press _TAB_ to switch from Object Mode to Edit Mode, then press the _3_ key to switch to face select mode. Then, select the top of the cylinder with _LEFT_CLICK_ , the press _I_ to inset the face, then press _E_ to extrude the face down into our would-be mug. If you have a hard time seeing what you’re doing, pressing _Z_ and selecting “Wireframe” can help. 4) Add loop cuts to the mesh with _CTRL + R_ , scroll the mouse wheel or type a number to increase the amount to 4 loops, then select the newly created faces at two points where the handle might connect. Then press _E_ to extrude the faces for a handle. To connect the handle, grab the two relevant edges at a time and press _F_ to fill the gap with a face. Do this until the handle is connected. Remember to delete hidden faces with _X_ key. 5) Find and click the blue wrench-shaped icon for the _Modifiers_ tab and click it to open the tab, then click “Add Modifier”, and from there find the “Subdivision Surface” modifier (under “Generate”) and click it to apply.  6) Switch back to _Object Mode_ with _TAB_ , then use the search function (you set up the key binding when you first set up Blender, for me the key is _SPACE_), and search “Smooth Shading” (“smoo” is usually enough to fetch the option), then click it to apply. “Shading” is basically just the way lighting interacts with the surface of your object, how it casts shadows, etc. Smooth shading, as the name implies, smoothes out that shading so surfaces look more rounded with less topology required. From here, it’s just a matter of tweaking the mesh to get the look you want. You can add “control loops” (carefully placed loop-cuts like we did earlier) to fine-tune the way the subdivision modifier works the model. You can press _G_ to grab (“G” for Grab) parts of the mesh and move them around, you can press _S_ to scale parts of the mesh to achieve different looks. When you’re satisfied with the shape of your mug, you can put a material on it by going to the _Material_ tab, which is found under where you earlier selected the blue wrench-icon for the _Modifiers_ tab. When you find the Material tab, click it and click “New” to add a new material.\n\n___THE MATERIALS:\n\nspoiler\n\nMaterials in 3d represent the surface qualities of your object. Materials consist of one or more Shaders, which themselves consist of multiple textures (or at least number values for relevant properties). Find the “Shading” tab along the top of the viewport. By default you will be in the “Layout” tab, but by switching to “Shading”, you will be able to see and change relevant materials information pretty easily. Adding a new material gives you a “Principled BSDF” shader by default, and this will work absolutely fine for the vast majority of your purposes, outside of extremely specific materials and surface effects. The Principled BSDF has a lot of different values you can change, but for now focus on “Base Color” and “Roughness”. Tweak the values to your liking, press _Z_ key to switch to “Material Preview”, where you can see a nice Eevee render of your mug floating around in some pre-set lighting arrangement.\n\nAt some point I’ll do additional tutorials that further explore materials and more advanced modeling, but it took a lot longer to make this tutorial than I figured, so I’ll call it for now.\n\nLeave questions in the comments and I’ll try to respond when I can. Thanks for reading!",
  "title": "Blender 3d Simple Modeling Tutorial"
}