Knife Tool and Lipstick

o, this render almost never happened.

And by the looks of the associated image for this blog post, you can probably pick up what I did wrong. But before I get into this rendering, let's start off like civilized people and talk about what I learned while engaging in my daily Blender concepts lesson.

I hadn't really used the knife tool before. I think I had only ever it used it once prior to create this tube of lipstick and it was to create rocks for Mars.

Realizing that I knew essentially nothing about the tool, I decided to learn more today. Plus, I needed it in order to create the angle of the lipstick as well. For starters, the knife tool can be accessed with the shortcut K. You can draw along the object that you want to cut and it'll then create faces wherever the line splits. Since the lipstick is at an angle, I thought that I could use the x-ray mode to slice through both the front and back at the same time. Well, wrong. But through trial and error, I realized that if I turned the lipstick around to the opposite side, I could align the beginning cuts of the knife tool with the vertices created on the other side.

Genius!

After slicing the lipstick, I deleted the faces and used shortcut F to fill in the face. I was so proud of figuring that out! I then used the bevel tool to bevel all the edges to get a nice curvature. I did notice some rigidness along the tube itself despite applying Shade Smooth. That's another bridge to cross another day.

Now, let's get into the drama with the rendering. So, before applying the materials to the lipstick, I told myself that I'd make a duplicate in case I messed things up. I hid the duplicate and then went about my business applying the material. Once I got to the step of rendering, that's when all hell broke loose. Although the lipstick looked beautiful in the viewport, the render itself looked questionable. What the heck were all those stripes? I was getting frustrated because I just knew that I had set everything up correctly. Well, hours later I did a final search around the internet and as it turned out...the issue was human error. Remember that duplicate lipstick? Well, although I hid it, I never hid it from the camera as well for rendering. Therefore, Blender was rendering the duplicate tube inside the original tube which produced the stripes. After deleting the duplicating tube altogether (because at that point, I was over it), the render came out beautifully.

I have a running list of 3D models that I'd like to create - apparently I started that list last July (per my Notes app). A tube of lipstick was on that list. I'm so glad that I was finally able to create this model. Let's see what I create next!