In part 1 of this two part tutorial series we are going to look at modeling a light bulb within Blender. This tutorial covers everything from modeling the bulb, the threads, inside of the bulb and more.
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- .blend file at the state of the tutorial
- Reference images
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19 Comments
I like very much this tutorial. I put a link to your page on my blog for those who enter go straight to your page. Well, your page is very good and very important for everyone who wants to learn about Blender. I’m learning a lot from your tutorials.
Thank you very much!
Animandré of Paulista-PE/Brasil.
Thank you for the plug and I’m thrilled to hear you like the tutorials!
Ok! I commented on your page in my blog. Thus, more people know your site. Best wishes and success!
Animandré.
Great stuff.
I could never get the screw thread right tho – I think because the cursor was ever so slightly off center when i started I ran into problems along the way.
cheers for the tut.
Wow! I love this tut! I have gone through several, and hope to go through all. I have a noob question though. When creating the pillar inside the bulb Im having problem with Scale. For example I build the base and extrude up. But when I next extrude and attempt to scale in or out my scale seems to be preset at a 45 degree angle. Does this have anything to do with how my center point/cursor is setup? Help!
Thanks
My best bet is that your control key is stuck down. Give that a shot and let me know if it works!
Nope, not the control key. It seems to be that my vertices/edge that I am tryin to scale out is tied directly to the cursor point. For example I left clicked at some random point in my image and I can see when I hit ‘S’ on the keyboard a line going from my distant cursor point to my vertices/edge that I am scaling. No matter where this cursor is placed it tied to it. So I attempted to select everything.. goto object mode and hit Center Cursor. But when I go back into edit mode to continue building up the center section of the light bulb everything is of again. Its scaling from the center of the light bulb and not for the center of each new loop cut or vertices edge. Kinda confused about this part.. everything else I was able to do pretty quickly and easily.
Hello Jonathan, thank you for this great tutorial. I really like your work and your tuts. You’re really talented.
This is the best site in my opinion for learning blender. I’m looking forward for part 2 (when does it come?)
Greetings from Germany
Oh
i just looked at “Moddeling” and did’t see that part 2 is in another section 
The 2nd part is here:
http://www.blendercookie.com/2009/08/24/creating-a-light-bulb-part-2/
I’m just about to start it myself. Hey once again Jonathan thank you for trouble shooting my Blender issue! Dear god it was starting to grate at me that I couldn’t complete the model or understand the How and Why’s of it all.
Hello Jonathan ,
Tutorials are great , here at home I try to learn as much as I can . I got to ask this question though , ugh .. Right now I just got done base part of the bulb , maybe I am asking this question at an early stage, you may have an answer in next minute but ,please do take it as a general one. Okay , as I said I got done the base ,and I have close to four thousand polygons ! I mean it looks lovely smooth and great but sooo many polygons . Somehow back in my mind I kind a thought you guys , fine 3D artists were always able to build good stuff with ,just amount (pretty low) polygons . I don’t know maybe I am old and have that 8 megs of ram days fear but tell me is it Blender that makes so many faces or no one cares about the polygon count cause everyone has pretty strong machines to handle whatever ?
thank you .
Great tutorial!
Thanks a lot.
I am sorry but these are the best tutorials i have found but i hate it HORRIBLY when you do something that’s vital and tell us nothing about how you did it like at the beginning when you made a mistake and decided to make the screw part a bit longer you undid the thing somehow. then you went and made the black part and didn’t say how you made it thin out. This is more frustrating then it is educational.
I figured out the scaling thing had to press “S” was that so hard to say… More trouble now what is Alt + ships? I don’t want to be mean because its hard to make tutorials but your hear to help people if this inset for begging then you could at least but a difficulty level on the thing. not like throwing something in someones face and it ends up that they cant continue because he tells you to press Alt + ships…
Take this as constructive criticism to make your future tutorials better…
Hey and thank you for hanging on the site and I hope the education is helping out a bit. We are always looking for ways to improve our education and ensure we aren’t making our viewers hate things. I was going to reply personally to you to also advocate more suggestions/feedback , but you didn’t enter in an real e-mail address.
We don’t always get to read every comment that goes on the site with over 3,000 logged, but we do read and reply to every support ticket at support@cgcookie.zendesk.com. When e-mails are sent here we are reminded, slapped in the face and kicked if we don’t answer these.
Thanks again for the feedback and look forward to cranking out more education.
Cheers,
W
Awesome tutorial
, thank you very much. I do have a question though, after doing the screw part, how do i reselect all without having to minutely select every vertex/line? You did it so easy, I hit alt-shift-right click on the base of it, but it only selects one part. Thanks!
Hey Josh,
You may select all of the threads simply by hovering your mouse cursor over one of the vertices and pressing “L”. Or, if you already have one of the vertices selected and want to select all of the remaining ones press “ctrl + L”.
Cheers,
Jonathan
I’ve gotten to the filament part, but I guess I missed a key part in the beginning because the base of my bulb has lots of vertices, which makes it so dark I cant see through it. How can I manipulate the base part now? It wont let me select any vertices on it, only the bulb / filament. Thanks!
Josh
Hey great tut!!!
one really quick noob question
how do you export your render as HD quality picture???