How to Make Erlenmeyers in Blender

let's dive right in we're going to start by deleting the default cube and adding in a circle so shift a mesh and circle i also want to come to this little box down here and change the number of vertices from 32 to 64. i'd like to have more geometry to work with now for starters the thing with getting good glassware is usually to have some sort of reference so i'm going to come to image reference and very simply i happen to have a nice reference for an erlenmeyer this is essentially all we're after this sort of nice smooth beveled edge a bit of a neck and then a top that is a little bit more pronounced and the gradations will add on as materials we don't actually need this reference for this specific case but if you're going to be looking for this try and get a good reference and you can actually find dimensions for beakers erlenmeyers etc that'll really help you add some realism to this if that's the look that you're after so we'll hide that we'll grab our circle and i'm simply going to hit f2 and then rename this to erlenmeyer from here we can get started with modeling so i will tab into edit mode hit 1 for front orthographic view on my number pad and then e to extrude and z to drag up in that direction once i've got something that i'm reasonably happy with i will then hit two for edge select and from here we're going to be doing most of the modeling holding down alt i'm going to click this bottom edge to select everything hit e and then s to scale in and i'm going to scale in a good distance just to about here then i'll hit shift r a few times to repeat that action and f to cap the whole thing now the reason that i want to do this with a circle instead of a cylinder to start is i like to have all the scaling applied don't worry about the details of that as a comment but what we're going to do from here is actually again with edge selected alt and select that outer edge once more control b to bevel and we're going to come down this bottom edge and the reason that we're beveling from down here is i don't want this ring to go over the next ring underneath so something to just about here is fine i will bring the number of cuts up to let's say just about here so five segments then one in front orthographic again alt and select the top edge and we're going to simply scale in and this is the essential shape of our erlenmeyer from here e and z to drag up and then we're going to also want a little bit of thickness so e and s to scale out holding down shift so it's very very subtle then g and z to drag that up e and z again to create the rest of the lip and that is going to be our basic shape now if there are aspects that you're not exactly pleased with for instance i find this a little bit tapering outwards so we may want to correct that if we're going to do that we're simply going to tab into edit mode select this ring here and scale that in ever so slightly to make that effect more or less pronounced we're going to leave it as is for now and then we'll edit as need be you'll also notice that there's a very sharp edge here between this rounded bottom and the actual conical part so to fix that we're also going to hold alt grab this double tap g to move it up just the tiniest bit and then i'm going to hit ctrl b to bevel again drag out this time we do not need nearly that many segments so dial back your mouse wheel until it's one or two something like this will be more than good enough and we also want to have roughly even geometry throughout so i'm then going to hit control r over the neck at a good number of cuts something like this should be just fine and ctrl r over the main body again scrolling up the mouse wheel until i have reasonably good size roughly uniform cuts they won't be perfect but this is going to be just fine and this is the basic shape of our erlenmeyer so now we've tabbed back into object mode i'm going to right click shade smooth and we're going to add modifiers so come to the modifier properties and we'll start by adding a solidify i'm going to change the offset from -1 to positive one and you could actually choose again a known glass thickness if you have a reference but for our model i'm going to go with 0.05 and that's going to give me roughly the look that i'm after something like this from there i'm going to hit ctrl 1 to add a subdivision surface modifier of one i find one is generally speaking going to do a pretty good job for both the viewport and the render if you want to see what's actually going to look like in the render simply increase this to 2. again i think it's better to work with one it's just a little bit smoother and so this is in fact roughly the shape that we were after if you want it to be again a little bit different let's say i want this top to be very much more pronounced i'm going to grab it tab back into edit mode holding down alt i'll select this edge and this edge hit s and shift z and then scale those out a little bit making sure i'm only selecting those two edges so s and shift z and then we'll scale that out just until about here and now we have something like that and that's not bad you are going to get this inner hollow-ish lip but that is usually something you can ignore depending on camera angle and i find it's not that obtrusive to the actual final shape if for instance you were unhappy with the curvature here and you want to be a bit smoother you could do the same thing we did before actually disabling both the solidify and the subdivision surface in edit mode and i find this helps actually make things a bit smoother grab this edge where the two intersect hit control b to bevel and then just drag out something like this would be more than good enough and now you'd have a bit of a smoother taper as you move in so if you want that effect then we're good to go from here we're gonna do a little bit of scene setup and then we'll get into materials so shift a add in a simple plane i'm going to hit s and about 20 to scale that up and we'll rename this to ground plane in terms of the material setup there's really no two ways about it if you want this to look real or photo real you're gonna have to work with cycles and i find that tends to be best for this approach so come to the render properties change your render engine from ev to cycles and then if i hit z and drag up for rendered we'll see this is what we're working with right now so let's go ahead and start by adding some materials i'm going to grab my erlenmeyer come down to the material properties and very simply i'm going to add a new material i'm actually not going to use a principled vsdf because i don't need to i'll use a glass bsdf i'm going to bring the roughness down to just about 0.1 and right now we can see that we have a very clear glass and that's pretty good but it doesn't have any of the gradations and we're going to add those in so i'm going to start by renaming this material to gradation glass and that will have the nice little scaling on the side and the little cube that has the labels over top i'm also going to add another material to this and this one will actually just be a very simple glass psdf again with the same roughness but this will be called base glass now we're going to take advantage of something about the solidify modifier to make use of this now the way that i like to do this is generally i want to keep the solidify and subdivision surface unapplied for as long as i can if i have to apply them which you do in some cases for glassware that's okay but it's generally better to have them be modular and then you could update the glass thickness or the amount of subdivision anytime you want from here we're really going to get into the meat of this which is how we want to get those nice gradations and very simply i'm going to open a new window i'm going to change to a shader editor i'm going to make sure that i have the gradations glass selected so that's the one that i'm working on here and to hide this side panel and from here i'm going to go to edit preferences add-ons and make sure that i have node wrangler checked so that is good from here i will simply grab this little glass bsdf here hit ctrl t and that's going to add in these three nodes i do need this to be uv and from there i'm just going to move all these over and i'm going to add a few things so shift a add a diffuse bsdf and i'm going to change this color to something very obvious something like blue then i'll grab the diffuse psdf hold down shift and grab the glass control and number pad 0 to add a mixed shader and i'm actually going to use this image texture as the factor for the mix shader so now i can use a black and white image and anywhere that is black will show the blue bsdf and anywhere that is white will show the glass bsdf right now you can see it's all blue we don't have an image yet but we're simply going to open an image and for this specific case we're going to use one of the textures that i made so if you don't want to go through all the trouble of making these textures yourself or any of the detail i actually have made free models of erlenmeyer's in this size range that you see so 25 mils up to 4000 mils and you can just use those they're available on gumroad for free i'll put a link in the description we're going to use the 500 milliliter erlenmeyer texture and right now you can see nothing has happened that's because we have to set up the uv coordinates for this so very very simply we're going to open another window here and this one we're going to change to a uv editor i'm going to with my erlenmeyer selected come to a solid view tab into edit mode and now i'm going to hit a to select everything then i'm going to hit u and unwrap and when i do this you're going to see this crazy circle appear now that's not really useful to me even if i come back into a rendered view now you'll be able to see there are some areas where that blue is appearing but it's all warped it's in the wrong place that's not what i want what i actually want is to come to a front orthographic view then i'm going to tab into edit mode i'm going to drag a box first i'm going to make sure i hit z and come into wireframe i want to grab all the faces in the front and back hit 3 for face select and i'm going to try and grab all the faces from here until just about there so click drag a box come up to about there and then i'm going to hit u and cylinder projection and now that i've done that i actually have a nice cylinder that is projected into this grid over all of that area and that is convenient because i can now start setting up the texture here so to do that i'm simply going to hit z and come back to rendered view then i will go ahead hit l to grab all of this area here making sure that is just this grid not this top or this bottom and then i can actually scale this in now when i do that we're going to start to be able to see a few things go on so tab back into object mode and you'll notice now i have this little blender grid and i have the gradations they're not exactly where i want them to be but we're going to move them you'll also notice i still have this blue up here and that's in the way so we're going to fix that tab into edit mode hit a to select everything and now you'll notice we have this circle area so i'm going to come in this window hit alt a to deselect then hover over the circle anywhere is fine hit l to select all of this area so alt a and then l to select all this area hit s and point one we're going to scale that down it doesn't really matter where we put this so long as it's on a white area because again remember white is going to tell it use glass and we want to use the glass in those spaces so if we tap back now you can see this is already done quite a bit for our problem we've solved many of the issues with it our main problem now is we want to be able to position these quotations and this and we want to scale them however we want so if i tab back into edit mode making sure i've got my erlenmeyer selected what i could do is hit alt a and start by just grabbing this and hitting l to do so and then s and scale and see you can see this is getting bigger if i want to do a little bit more i could then start scaling in y or x and that's going to actually shrink or make it a little bit bigger or smaller so now you can see that's pretty decent hit s and x and drag that in this direction let's say this is something i'm happy with and i can also zoom in a little bit here hit g and y and drag that up and that will control where in this grid this is going to appear so you see my 100 200 300 400 500 are actually not badly placed and they are a reasonable scale i could sensibly use this to align them it's best again to consult a reference but if we tab back into edit mode now and i just want to move them up maybe a little bit further and then scale wider so i can get a bit of a narrower look something like this is pretty good now the thing that i'd like to do is i would really like for this area here to actually be where this appears and so to do that i'm simply going to tab into edit mode and then i'm going to alte deselect everything i'm going to go ahead and hold down well first i'll select the face that i want to start with so let's say just about here then i'm going to hold down control and create a box so something like this i'm going to follow the lines all the way to just about here connecting to just about there and again holding down control through this whole process then i can go ahead and hit c and that's going to let me draw by holding down left click and just selecting an area here and i'm going to color in that whole area essentially now if i happen to accidentally click outside that area which i do not want to do simply hold down shift and then you can draw over it again and that will deselect it so right click to exit circle select and now you'll see i have this selection here so what i'm going to do is g x and move that right over the area that i want to appear so this is now covering the black area it will appear blue i have the gradation where i want it to you'll notice though that this gradation is still here and by gradation i mean this part of the texture so simply a to select everything alt a first and then you can see now this area that we moved before has actually been cut out so what we're going to do is the same thing we're going to select this specific area and we're going to remove it and just move it off to the white so alt deselect everything in the viewport zoom in a bit and holding down control starting with one face then holding down control just draw a box around that area again c to select and this time we'll just draw something like this this is totally fine right click to exit that come over to this window hit l to grab this specific thing and we can just move that off to the side now if we tap back into object mode here we actually have everything we essentially needed we have our gradations texture in place we have our little cube in place you'll notice that this is a bit stretched and we're going to fix that but first we're going to address the weird doubling effect that's going on here and this is actually because of the solidify modifier so it's creating this map and is putting the texture first on the outer face but then also on the interface and we don't want it to do that so we're going to go to the modifier properties come to solidify drop down to materials and for material offset we're going to choose one and now what that is doing is it's using the base glass before for all of the interfaces so now we only have the texture appearing on the outer side which is where we want it the inner part is all the same glass that we have right here essentially so that's perfect and we're going to have that nice look going on so from here let's go ahead and fix this little texture issue and then that will wrap up the erlenmeyers essentially we'll do a little bit of liquid as well just for good measure now that we've corrected for the inner glass reflection we're going to simply come in and tailor this so maybe it doesn't look as stretched along the actual axis so you can see right now it's going up and up let's say we wanted it to be a little bit more square on a beaker this is easy because it's just flat but on the erlenmeyer there is some curvature so we have to account for that grab your erlenmeyer tab into edit mode and you'll see in the uv window all of these things have appeared hit l over all the areas that you don't want to work with then hit h to hide them from here we can now actually work with we're also going to hide these little vertices that appeared from somewhere they're not important though so now we're actually going to work with just this area so l to grab it and if i wanted to i could now hit s and y to scale this make it bigger as an x to make it narrower or wider the thing that i actually want to do is make it a little bit more square and the way that i'm going to achieve that effect is alt a to deselect everything two to select just the edges and i'm going to hold down alt and select any of the top edges to get this entire row i'm then going to hit o which is going to turn on proportional editing and i'm going to change from smooth to linear from here i'll hit s x and i'm going to actually dial the mouse wheel in until you can see the actual circle then i can actually start to narrow this and what you'll see that is doing is it's changing whether or not the cube is stretching out or pointing in now i want it to be a little bit more of a uniform cube throughout the length of the glass so i'm going to scale it in something like that and you can make the mouse wheel bigger or smaller to have this effect carry over more or less to the entirety of the cube so i think something like this is probably all right and now i've made the whole thing just a little bit too big so i'll hit l to select the whole thing s to drag it and i'll hit o to turn off proportional editing s and then i'll drag it and let's say i want to be a bit narrower so we'll change it in this direction and with a little bit of tweaking you can have this happen for your work as well you can also again hit g and move this up and down to kind of arrange this better as you need to and again remember the whole thing is editable so even though if i hit alt h now you can see all the parts are all over the place if i had to i could simply do the process from the beginning again come into a front orthographic view choose all these areas cylinder project and then it would actually all work but this is essentially our erlenmeyer so from here i'm going to do a very quick setup of liquid and how you can get to work inside this space and that will essentially be it now liquid is very very neat in cycles and it plays along very well it's a little bit different and evie but we're going to stick with the cycles explanation for today so we've already made our erlenmeyer we're going to use it to control that shape come into a front orthographic view tab into edit mode come to wireframe and then simply grab out the area that you think you want for that amount of liquid so i'm going to grab this entire bottom area and say i want the liquid to be that much i'm going to hit shift d drag this out to the side and then right click and that will snap it back in place then i'm going to hit p and choose separate by selection you can see that's created another erlenmeyer now this is going to have all the same materials texture etc as the first one we don't want that and so what we're going to do is tap back into object mode grab this and we'll rename it to liquid we're also going to do a few things we're going to start by getting rid of the solidify modifier and then if we come to wireframe you can see that the top is not closed here for the liquid we will actually want the top to be closed so i'm going to tab into edit mode hit z hide our actual erlenmeyer two to edge select alt on this top series of edges and then e and scale in and then i'll repeat that a few times with shift r hit f and that will be our liquid essentially so if we come back to our erlenmeyer we can see these are intersecting right now so i what i need to do is shrink the liquid to fit inside the erlenmeyer i'll hit one for front view again come into a rendered view and then s and shift z and just scale the liquid in just a little bit you can see right now it's actually pivoting to the base of the object that's fine but we do need this to scale in just a bit so s and z as well and then g and z to move the whole thing up inside the glass from here let's go ahead and set up the material for the liquid now liquids in blender can be notoriously finicky and cycles does not necessarily make this any easier so we're going to start by hitting z coming into rendered view and we see we have our liquid i'm going to grab it add a new material and then we're actually going to stick with the principle bsdf for now i'll set the base color to be whatever color i want the liquid to be and i could do this in other ways but this is the simplest way and it converts very nicely to eevee so we're going to go with that if you were fine with this cartoony liquid you could actually say i'm done and that would be it but for our purposes we're going to change some of these values i'm going to bring the roughness down to 0.1 the transmission all the way up to 1 and right away we're going to run into our first issue which is that liquid actually does not have the same ior or index of refraction as glass might we're actually going to have to change that so drop it down to one and that's going to correct that problem so now we have something that actually looks pretty decent if you wanted to you could also explore volume absorption for liquids blender guru actually has a good video describing all of this stuff on making i believe it's tea and if you want to learn more i highly encourage you to check that out he really does a stellar job explaining this and why you might actually want to do it at the risk of rambling on i'm going to wrap this up here i will save beakers in their entirety for a separate video and this should essentially help you make relatively good looking photo real-ish erlenmeyer's without too much difficulty in blender so as always if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing sharing with your friends and colleagues and until next time you have yourselves a great old day

Channel: CG Figures

Views: 2,876

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Id: s-dWepuWlCQ

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020