The Toy - Wooden Coffee Machine

The third assignment for 3D design class at the FHOÖ Campus Hagenberg.
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The task was to create a toy, something that "a kid would play with". It couldn't be a character or an electronic toy like a game console, so I struggled for some time to come up with something original, as I didn't want to do a vehicle, which would have been the obvious choice.
I came along these kitchen appliances for children on Pinterest and liked the concept, so I went from there.
I don't even like coffee, but for some reason this was the toy I decided to make.
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Like for the second assignment, I used Blender for modelling, lighting and rendering. This time, we were allowed to (=supposed to) use textures, so UV mapping and texturing were also needed (and also done in Blender. I love this program, seriously).
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This time, I challenged myself to use a subdivision workflow for the entire piece, which I haven't really done so far. Sure, I used subdivision on multiple occasions before, but it has always been more of an afterthought and not modelling with subdivision in mind.
So, I researched how to get the most out of the subdivion surface modifier in Blender and found an interesting technique. Josh Gambrell has a tutorial on YouTube that shows how to use the bevel modifier in combination with bevel weight and the subD modifier, reducing the amount of support loop cuts you usually need a lot.
This really spoke to me and so I tried it out for this piece.
I found hat I really like this way of working and will probably use that strategy in my next projects again. It doesn't come without any problems, but I found it to be way more enjoyable then having to think about hundreds of loopcuts scattered across my objects.
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I am teaching a Blender crash course to my friends, as our university only teaches Maya at the moment (although that might change soon!). The last lesson was about UVs in preparation for this assignment and because my knowledge wasn't incredibly good in that area, I informed myself ahead, which definitely helped.
I could apply that knowledge and built an intuition for where to set seams pretty quickly on this project. There are still some areas where I'm unsure of the best move to take, but generally I'm pretty happy with the UVs.
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I learnt some new things about texturing as well, but I mainly just did things the way I always do. I thought about exporting to Substance Painter, but I knew I would have to spend time learning the interface again that I simply didn't have. Maybe next time.
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All in all I'm very happy with the outcome and had a lot of fun working on this assignment.
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Rendered in Blender with Cycles