Whenever you open a new scene in Blender, you will start in Object Mode and you will have three objects in your scene: a default cube mesh, a light, and a camera. For now, let’s practice viewing the cube in 3D space. Select the cube object by clicking it with LEFT_CLICK, and then press the “.” key (the one by the number-pad, not the normal period key) to focus on the cube object. This will not only snap your view to the selected object, but will also make it the focal point for subsequent viewport movements, such as rotating the viewport view around the cube by clicking the MIDDLE_MOUSE_BUTTON and moving the mouse around.

You can also zoom in our out by using the MOUSE_WHEEL (for extra precise control you can use ALT + MIDDLE_MOUSE_BUTTON and then move the mouse to adjust).

You can move the viewport across or up and down (“panning”? is that the term?) by using SHIFT + MIDDLE_MOUSE_CLICK and moving the mouse.

When we are done practicing viewport movement, we can also practice scaling the cube sith the S key (“S” for scale), rotate it with R key (“R” for Rotate), and grab and move it with the G key (“G” for Grab). Finally, we can select all of the objects by double tapping the A key to select all (“A” for All), and then pressing the X key to delete them, giving us a clear workspace.

1. Press SHIFT + A, move the cursor over “mesh” (the top option), then down to “cylinder” and select it with LEFT_CLICK to spawn a cylinder.

2. After spawning the cylinder, you’ll notice a little option in the lower left-hand of the viewport you’re working in, which will say “Add Cylinder”. Click the “Add Cylinder” option that appears in the lower-left hand side of the screen and set “Vertices” value to 10.

3. With the cylinder object selected (as indicated by an orange-ish highlight around the object), press TAB to switch from Object Mode to Edit Mode, then press the 3 key to switch to face select mode. Then, select the top of the cylinder with LEFT_CLICK, the press I to inset the face, then press E to extrude the face down into our would-be mug. If you have a hard time seeing what you’re doing, pressing Z and selecting “Wireframe” can help.

4. Add loop cuts to the mesh with CTRL + R, scroll the mouse wheel or type a number to increase the amount to 4 loops, then select the newly created faces at two points where the handle might connect. Then press E to extrude the faces for a handle. To connect the handle, grab the two relevant edges at a time and press F to fill the gap with a face. Do this until the handle is connected. Remember to delete hidden faces with X key.

5. Find and click the blue wrench-shaped icon for the Modifiers tab and click it to open the tab, then click “Add Modifier”, and from there find the “Subdivision Surface” modifier (under “Generate”) and click it to apply.

6. Switch back to Object Mode with TAB, then use the search function (you set up the key binding when you first set up Blender, for me the key is SPACE), and search “Smooth Shading” (“smoo” is usually enough to fetch the option), then click it to apply. “Shading” is basically just the way lighting interacts with the surface of your object, how it casts shadows, etc. Smooth shading, as the name implies, smoothes out that shading so surfaces look more rounded with less topology required.

From here, it’s just a matter of tweaking the mesh to get the look you want. You can add “control loops” (carefully placed loop-cuts like we did earlier) to fine-tune the way the subdivision modifier works the model. You can press G to grab (“G” for Grab) parts of the mesh and move them around, you can press S to scale parts of the mesh to achieve different looks.

When you’re satisfied with the shape of your mug, you can put a material on it by going to the Material tab, which is found under where you earlier selected the blue wrench-icon for the Modifiers tab.

When you find the Material tab, click it and click “New” to add a new material.

Materials in 3d represent the surface qualities of your object. Materials consist of one or more Shaders, which themselves consist of multiple textures (or at least number values for relevant properties).

Find the “Shading” tab along the top of the viewport. By default you will be in the “Layout” tab, but by switching to “Shading”, you will be able to see and change relevant materials information pretty easily.

Adding a new material gives you a “Principled BSDF” shader by default, and this will work absolutely fine for the vast majority of your purposes, outside of extremely specific materials and surface effects.

The Principled BSDF has a lot of different values you can change, but for now focus on “Base Color” and “Roughness”. Tweak the values to your liking, press Z key to switch to “Material Preview”, where you can see a nice Eevee render of your mug floating around in some pre-set lighting arrangement.