Alright, for this tutorial, here’s what we’ll be making:

Simple glass beaker. For all your mad scientist labratory needs. Or maybe that’s just me. Anyways, moving on.

Alright, so, open a new project and delete the standard cube. Select the cube with a Right Mouse Button (RMB) click and delete with the X key. Don’t worry about the light and camera for right now.

Alright, now I am a stickler for keeping perspectives proper, so go ahead and press NUM-1 to get a front view.

Views

Blender has several built-in default camera angles to help you visualize your project. The four most helpful are Top, Front, Side, and Camera (in my experience). These can all be accessed from the number pad with the numbers 7, 1, 3, and 0 respectively. Refer to the following diagram (taken from the Essential Blender book, downloadable here).

This image made it all make sense for me.

Alright, so once we’re in front view, add a UV Sphere. Spacebar will bring up a context menu from which you can add just about anything to a scene.

From here you want to select Add > Mesh > UV Sphere. Go ahead and accept the default settings. (Segments 32, Rings 32, Radius 1.0).

Now you should have a nice clean sphere in the center of your screen.

Alright, time for some mesh modeling. Optionally, press Z. This will change your view to Wireframe mode. I find this view easier for what we’re about to do, but do what works best for you. After that, press Tab to enter Edit Mode.

Edit mode is where you can edit an object’s parts (vertices, edges, and faces) individually. When you first enter edit mode, you’ll probably see all the vertices selected. Any vertices or edges that are selected will be yellow. And faces that those vertices or edges make up will be light purple.

Press A to deselect all vertices (pressing A when you have no vertices selected will select all). Now, press B. This will give you a tool to rectangular marquee select vertices. We’re gonna select *most* of the bottom vertices, like the following:

If you count from the center line of vertices (here running along the X (red) axis), I started my selection two rows down. As always, feel free to experiement.

The rectangular selection tool we used selects all vertices (or objects) in the defined area. Both the ones you see and the ones behind those. This can be seen if you tilt your object slightly (Alt/Option+click and drag):

Alright, once you have this selected, go back to front view (1) and press S to scale, and then press Z to constrain scaling to the Z axis. We want to mostly flatten this set of vertices so they look about like this:

It needs to be only *almost* flat. We’re also gonna make this bottom curve around the bottom edge. Once you’ve got this, grab the next highest row of vertices:

The move tool in Blender is activated with the G key (for “Grab”, traditionally). Drag this row down to just above the bottom of the beaker. Then scale it (S) down just a bit. Do not constrain the scale at all for this one. Regular will do fine.

You may only barely be able to see the difference in radius in the picture above, but be sure that yours is slightly smaller. Do this one more time with the next highest row of vertices.

Note: For more precise movement/scaling, you can press the arrow key while moving/scaling/rotating. Blender handles precise movements a little oddly. Moving the arrow keys while modifying actually only nudges your cursor slightly. Which means that the closer your view is to the object, the more precise movements you get.

Don’t worry if you don’t get it perfect, we’ll be changing a setting in a bit that will help smooth this out.

Next step is to grab the next highest set of vertices and scale it in to form the body of the beaker. Pay attention to the angle of your curve at the bottom. It should be flush along the curve, no corners. You’ll also need to finagle the other vertices here, because you don’t really have enough room between the bottom and your remaining vertices. I suggest grabbing all of the above vertices and dragging them upwards along the z axis, far enough to be out of your way.

You should come up with something like this:

You may find this a good step to fix any problems with the bottom. I found that the bottom was a little too small, so I stretched it out. I also adjusted those two rows of vertices we just made.

Alright, next we need to make the neck of the beaker. Can you guess how? Yep. Another row of vertices. This one needs to be straight above the row that forms the base of the neck (the one we just modified).

This will form the neck of the beaker. At this point, it’s alright if the neck isn’t quite long enough. Later on you’ll be able to adjust that pretty easily.

I’m gonna let you on your own for a bit. Using the same techniques from above, we want to make a curved lip for the beaker. Here’s the commands we’ve learned so far that you’ll need:

B — Rectangular marquee select vertices
G — “Grab” vertices to move them. Constrain the movement to the z axis with Z.
S — Scale. Use this to adjust the radius of the rings of vertices.

This is what mine ended up like. Yours should look similarly curved around the top. Note we still have more vertices up top. We’ll work with that in a minute.

Here’s a closer view of one edge so you can get an idea of how the lip is curved:

Alright, now that we have that, we need to bring in the tip of the beaker just a bit. Bring down another row of vertices and scale it in as shown below:

This row should be smaller in radius than the neck of the beaker, and just slightly below the lip of the beaker.

Alright, this should do it. Go ahead and select all the remaining vertices above and delete them by pressing X and then choosing “Vertices” from the menu that appears.

You now have your beaker set up. This model is also fairly adjustable. However, it’s still polygonal and oh so opaque. Let’s fix that next.

First, press Tab to go back into Object mode. If you were modeling in wireframe mode, your model will look like a bunch of pink lines. Press Z to make the model a bit more solid.

Now, with the beaker selected, press F9. This will bring up the Editing panel in the bottom section of your window. Press the New button in the Link and Materials section. (There’s two “New” buttons there, so make sure you get the right one.)

Also while you’re in there, click the “Set Smooth” button. (Ok, technically, it says “Set Smoot”, but who’s counting?)

Once you’ve done this, press F5, which will bring you to the Materials panel.

The following material was taken from the wikibook Blender 3D: Noob to Pro. This glass material has the following properties under the designated tabs:

Material
Alpha: 0.1 (A)
Color: White (Click the colored box next to ‘Col’ to bring up a color picker, or enter RGB values of 1.0 for all.)

Shaders
Reflectivity: 0.2 (Ref)
Specularity: 1.5 (Spec)
Hardness: 511 (Hard)
Translucency: 1 (Tralu)
Ambient: 0.5 (Amb)
Emit: 0 (Emit)

Mirror Trasp
Ray Mirror: enabled
Ray Mirror: 0.2 (RayMir)

Ray Transparency: enabled
IOR (angular index of refraction): 1.37 (IOR)

Once all these values have been entered, you’re ready to preview! You can either render out the current frame (assuming the object is within the camera’s view) from the menu with Render > Render Current Frame, or for a quick preview, pressing Shift+P will pull up a Heads-Up Display type window that acts as a viewing glass to see just a portion of your model previewed from your current viewpoint.

Your model will probably look a bit odd. And a lot blue. This is because the way a glass object looks depends heavily on it’s environment. Either what you’re seeing through it, or what it’s reflecting. For the example at the top, I created a box out of six planes. This really helps in trying to work with glass or other reflective materials. I suggest you set up a quick environment anytime you mess with new, reflective textures.

For any practical purpose, you’ll also have to work a lot with lights for this or any other glass object to look right. This is true, of course, for real life glass objects as well.

That wraps it up! Happy Blending!