You can also click the bottle again at that point to see the current thickness temporarily applied to the entire object. To change the thickness, use the plus/minus (+/-) keys on the numeric keypad. To Toggle the thickness between inside and outside of the bottle, hit the SPACEBAR. Once again, Amapi uses +/- and SPACEBAR to toggle a set of meaningful parameters.

Easy enough to remember?

Apply a thickness of about 1 cm to the bottle, and validate by hitting the ENTER key. Then select the other part (the smiling cutout) and apply thickness there too.

Adding a podium for better presentation
Hit the 0 key for viewing the entire scene, then the 2 key for front view. Toggle back to orthographic view. Zoom out a bit. Then go to the Construction toolkit and select the cube (which pops up when you rest the mouse over the sphere), or select from the menu Tools > Construction > Cube

Click a first time to position the coordinate center wherever you want it. Then click to position the bottom of the cube, somewhere under the base of the bottle. A rubberband cube appears, select the size and click again. Make sure the cube comes close to touching the bottom base of the bottle.

Select the Proportional Scale tool from the assembly toolkit, or Tools > Assembly > Proportional Scale. And hit the SPACEBAR in order to toggle out of proportional mode into single-axis mode. You want to scale it horizontally so as to make it much wider than the bottle and thus create a base. Click to fix that size. Then hit 4 to get a side view and repeat the scale operation; this time it'll be along the other axis (blue instead d of red).

Swipe away when done, toggle back out of orthographic and into perspective view, use the arrow keys to examine it from various angles. Hit ENTER to render.

Adding material properties
For more visual realism, let's add wood or marble to the base. Select (click) the base to make sure it's the current part. Then select the paint palette in lower-right corner of the control panel, or select Render > Shader. Assuming you have configured the Material Editor for extended mode, you will have a display similar to this:

Note the catalog entries at the top (empty in my example here). Also note the main material properties (level 0) at right. There is a small preview window; you can use the arrow keys and other viewing control keys from numeric keypad and control panel to navigate around this just like in the main workshop view.

You can add multiple layers of texturing, be it 3D procedural, 2D procedural or 2D image-based textures. These layers can affect, in various ways, what happens to color, transparency, reflection, bump, specular color, etc....

In the lower center, under "Add a layer," click on [Texture 3D]. To the right a few additional sliders appear. These are the ones that control the parameters of this procedural shader. One pulldown menu in that new set is set on wood, select and change it to Grid. Set the Perturbation to zero. Change the Diffuse portion in base layer (level 0) to White. If the resulting color hasn't changed much, it's because the color from the procedural texture is replacing the color component, rather than mixing or adding to it. You can change that too, under the preview window. Where it says "Operation," click on the Replace menu and change it to Mix; then use the Balance slider to set the desired mix. Also, in the lower left set the Reflection slider to about 20 percent.

For the bottle, repeat this material selection. In this example, no additional textures were applied, but we tweaked the specular reflection a bit and gave it some reflection too, and made it blueish in color.

The separate (smiling) piece was made transparent, with a 3D texture of noise mapped to bump to give it scattered refraction and get the tempered glass effect.

 
 

Lighting
For an even better rendering we'll want to add lightsources. Add a Spot light to the scene: Render > New Light > Spot. Or select the spot light from the four^th toolkit (toggle with SPACEBAR to the rendering/animation toolkit). Click a first time to indicate the target illumination point. Move the mouse; use the arrow keys too; and click again to position the spot light.

Double-click a light to see its attributes, and change the shadow quality to the max of 10. Use the Stretch tool from the modeling toolkit or Tools > Modeling > Stretch.

To reposition, if necessary, where the spot light is positioned and where it's shining at (target point). You can even grab a point on the outer cone and change the spot light's cone angle - both for the inner angle (at maximum intensity) and the outer cone (where the light intensity fades to zero).

In the example below, a total of three spot lights were positioned that way to create long or short shadows.

 
 

As you will undoubtedly see, Amapi offers a wealth of modeling features and a few rendering capabilities as well. In this tutorial, we didn't touch upon the animation features. Amapi is primarily used as a modeler, perhaps a companion modeler to high-end animation and rendering tools. But if you're starting from scratch and want a somewhat intuitive and easy to learn tool that will do some decent rendering as well, this may just be what you're looking for.

There are many more ways to create models in Amapi, from extruding surfaces to meshing across construction curves. We will bring you further tutorials on Amapi 3D in the coming weeks and months.

For more information on Amapi 3D, vist http://www.tgs.com/amapi.