Making an hourglass
This tutorial will teach you to make a great sandglass, which you can use for plenty of purposes. You can find the finished model and other stuff here Glass.zip
Start a new scene. Go to back view. Go to Configuration\background image. Choose your blueprint. I used this one:
Now to begin! Go to Objects\spline object. Choose vertex selection and add points like on the image shown (you add the points by holding 'ctrl' and clicking your mouse button).
(If you image seems deformed, type these values for your background image:size x=900;y=100).
Draw out the edges of the glass part. It MUST be two-sided (it must have an inner and outer edge) . Start from the bottom following the outer edge, and when you reach the middle of glass part, start doing the same for the inner edge until you get to the beggining . Type must be linear Linear.
Here you can see how the edge should look:
Create a Lathe object. Put your line in it (just drag it onto it).
You will get the glass body. Now we must make the rest of it.
Upper and lower holder:
For the holders, we need to insert two sircles into our scene and position them according to the image.
Make two extrude objects, and place the circles into them. Type these values in: Movement: x:0; y:90; z:0
Start Cap: Cap and rounding; end cap: cap and rounding;
Rounding type: 2 steps. (in version 9 the radius should be 19).
Now for the two sticks on the sides. These are the two you saw in the previous two images. I won't explain how to make them, because the process is identical as with the glass body. Because they are not hollow, you don't need to draw the inner edge, only trace the outer. Mine came out like this:
The model is nearly over. All you have to do is to insert everything into a hypernurbs object (except the two extruded circles, they need to be sharp).
The model is now over. Now for the materials.
GLASS
Make a new material. Double click it and name it 'glass'.
Color.
The color should be pure white. The brightness to 100%
Diffusion.
Diffusion should be around 19, because it still keeps some light on it. Uncheck all checkboxes.
Transparency.
The color should be pure white with brightness of 100%. Refraction must be Fresnel, and give it a value of 1.52. Pick Frasnel for texture And click a little preview image to edit it . Mix mode must be Multiply. Make it white with a LITTLE very light gray at the ends.
Reflection.
Seti it up as on the image below.
Specular.
Set it up as on the image. (If you have older versions, where you don't have fallof and innerwidth, make height 700%, and width 0).
Drag the material onto the glass body and render it. If you did everything right, you got something like this:
Although the glass doesn't seem very realistic, it is. To see the material like it really is, insert a floor object and an Omni light. Now the material shows it's real qualities.
THE COPPER MATERIAL
Since this is and old thing, we need an old material. The most popular for sandglasses (and the prettiest) is copper.
Make a new material and double click it.
Color.
Reflection.
Environment.
The scene's reflection is not enough. To add a little more realism, we should put an Environment. That image will be reflected on the copper.
This is the environment you need:
Specular.
Copper is kind of a dull metal, and that is why we need width:
Drag it to the rest of our objects and render it. You should get something like this:
Hmmm, it doesn't seem real enough. Select the omni you made earlier . Give it these parameters:
Type: Omni
Shadow: Soft
Go to Render Settings and under Antialiazing choose Best. Render the scene.
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