Getting Unstuck

Here you can see the results of yet another reverse engineering exercise. I whipped this one out in less than an hour one evening recently, and then worked on rendering it for about a half hour. It was another one of those, "hmm, how would I model this object?" moments that soon became "Now I've just gotta see how quickly I can get this." When my mom found me kneeling in the kitchen examining the OXO measuring cup so intently, she couldn't help but laugh.

It's inevitable to get stuck from time to time. And so I did. The handle for this cup was something new for me, but I wanted to give it a try. I tried to slog through the problem, and tried a couple different approaches. I learned a few things along the way, such as how to create a 3D spline by projecting two non-coplanar sketches onto one another, but still I wasn't able to find a satisfactory solution. I've gotten into the somewhat bad habit of talking to the designers of the program in harsh tones, even though they can't hear me, when I get really frustrated with their program. It's not very helpful to tell me that there was an error, and then not say a word about why there was an error. Sometimes it's over a simple issue that's easily fixed through a bit of trial and error in setting options (which I then go read about), but sometimes it's a much bigger problem. Sometimes after a bit of tweaking, I can get something out of it, which then shows me that my whole approach is flawed. That's still frustrating.





So, after a few hours, I knew it was time to move on. I found a cool product design forum a little while ago, so I looked through another tutorial, discovered an essential feature I had overlooked, and played around with it to have a bit of fun. A silly, improvisational design every once in a while helps me feel refreshed for getting back to my bigger projects.