Rendering a perfume bottle with Blender

Tutorial – Blender

Article from Issue 253/2021
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Blender's massive feature set can seem overwhelming at first. Choosing a manageable project can help you get started.

Blender, the free and open source creation suite, includes a modeler, three renderer engines, a compositor, a tracker, a nonlinear video-editing system, a particle system, and the ability to animate physical simulations and export them as video. Suffice it to say, figuring out where to start can be overwhelming. Picking a relatively manageable project is key. An easy way to start is to model a simple item, such as a perfume bottle. For this tutorial, I will model a transparent perfume bottle filled with liquid. By using concrete but varied shapes, a limited scope, and a small number of different materials (i.e., surfaces), this tutorial can help take the frustration out of getting started with Blender. (Note: Having some basic previous experience with Blender will be helpful in this tutorial).

Setup

I always recommend working with the latest version of Blender, which is currently 2.93. However, you will find Blender 2.93 in only a few distributions. For instance, Ubuntu 21.04 includes Blender 2.83.5, and Fedora provides the latest version via updates. If your distribution does not have the current release, you can download the program as a TAR.XZ file from Blender's homepage [1] and unpack the archive on your computer. Then call the program's binary, blender, or create a starter for the desktop environment and link to the TAR.XZ file.

Before getting started, you may want to make a couple of adjustments. If English isn't your first language, you can change the localization in Edit | Preferences… | Interface under Translation. Keep in mind that many of the menus will remain in English (and many online tutorials use English terminology).

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