"Be 100% sure"

Those were the words that would stare at me whenever I come out of the bath room after a ponderous bath. The words were part of a dettol liquid soap bottle, left unused for ....quite some time. So on my birthday, which keeps getting more uneventful every year that it surprises me, I finally took the dettol liquid soap...thingy (hereafter called "squeezy") to my room and "studied" a bit closely. (much to the anxiety of my mother).

After a few months of modelling petty things like chairs, champagne glass, tables and the irks, I found a technique that could help me model most of the non-baffling objects into 3D studio max. The step I folllow in modelling an object is pretty simple and straight-forward: Look at the objet and try to visualize it in terms of primitive shapes and geometry, then try to figure out how to place those primitives in the software. I don't know how long this method will stay good, but it has, so far.

Back to the squeezy. Designing the squeezy was the most fun thing I had done in quite some time. It had quite some radical new challenges than the chairs and tables: It had curves all over its body. I tried a total of 5 to 6 different approaches to model the sqeezy and all of them turned ..er..ugly, at best. Finally, after some sleep, I got the shape I wanted.
One of the reasons I didn't start modeling humans was 'cause of the curves (no double meanings here). The next challenge was the squeezy's nozzle. It was all curves. Again, when i was sufferring from unsuccessfulness, some sleep cured me. (But I really am not satisfied with the current nozzle).

The next fun part was desiging the label that's stuck on the front side. I never thought I would ever do "real" texturing this early into my designing hobby, but there I was firing up ol'photoshop cs and painting the logo. *sniff*I am so proud*sniff*. After working with an excellent context-sensitive and "sense ful" application like 3ds max, Adobe photoshop felt clumsy like hell. Found my way through it in an hour. (actually, I was searching for the custom shapes button :( ) Struggled with gradients, got fed-up with layers, wrestled with transparency and finally split my head trying to texture-map the squeezy in 3d studio max.

After that, my favourite renderer, Mental Ray started acting up. It would just crash just before rendering the scene. I tried changing the environment map, materials and render settings but to no avail. Since I was reluctant to go with the default scanline renderer, I downloaded some famous renderers like brazil and vray, albeit as trials. Both had a LOT more controls than the default scanline. Brazil(rio, the free version)would only output in 512x384 mode and vray was SLOW. So I went with default scanline renderer. After a lot of burnt-out images, I finally found the lighting that produced the least artifacts and settled with it.

Here are the final renders of squeezy: