Fantasy Mug of Magical Orange Juice

Another week goes by and another spark of inspiration hit me. I watched a video over lunch about 3D modeling and it led me to want to create something new. There’s a tutorial I have saved to watch sometime of a stylized mug modeled in Maya and textured in Substance Painter and it got me wanting to create my own mug just from the thumbnail. So, I set out to accomplish just that.

I wanted to try and create a basic drinking mug–mine is full of magical orange juice–in Maya in one sitting from start to finish just to practice more asset production. I practiced creating four-sided polygons–though I did just watch a very interesting video about utilizing n-gons for concept and hard surface modeling purposes–I practiced lighting, and I practiced speed. This was not going to be as pretty or involved as my Stylized House project, but it was going to still be portfolio worthy so I wanted to make sure that I did my best in a short amount of time.

I didn’t really utilize anything in this project that I haven’t used before, but I did do a single boolean to generate the shape of one of the mug planks. It was not groundbreaking, but it did help me get my desired result way faster. A little clean-up later and blam I had myself a legal geometry mug plank.

The handle was nice to model. I traced an existing image of a classic mug handle and textured it using the 3D paint tool in Maya as well as Photoshop for the dragon design and moniker. I’m imagining the mug in a fantasy setting more than anything.

Here is a look at the subdivided model:

Here is the model with basic texturing that shows the low-light tavern scene I set up:

Finally, we have the final quality render:

All things considered, the project took me about 1 hour and 40 minutes total including render time. It isn’t the worst, but I do wish I would have dedicated some more time to it. For instance, I would like to have taken the model into ZBrush and modeled knicks and scratches to generate a bump map. The handle itself would benefit from carving an actual dragon into its side, as well. Lastly, I wish I would have UV’ed the model entirely so I would have more control over painting the textures. The planks looks fine, but they have a cartoon aesthetic instead of looking like genuine wood. While I like the way it looks, in the future I definitely want to dig deeper.

Still! Overall I am very happy with it given the fact that it was just a practice run for fun. If you would like to see my process (albeit sped up), check out the timelapse video below.