3D Silliness

I know this post was meant to be for our finalized renders, but I hit so many roadblocks and errors that I haven't made much progress despite spending hours and hours on it. On the one hand, I've learned a couple new commands and ways of working through my troubleshooting, but on the other hand I've ended up spending a LOT of time on troubleshooting.  Some of the main issues I've had/am currently having are certain pieces not aligning as they should despite the care I put into measuring, boolean operations failing, and my biggest killer: getting too ahead of myself and joining objects + filleting their edges before they were finished. By the time I realized I had more to add to the pieces I had filleted, I wasn't able to undo it, and I ended up having to build the pieces all over again. I think I just got too excited seeing the pieces so close to being finished!!  So even though I'm super excited to play with Keyshot, I just have to keep on troubleshooting until...

 I used this mug to experiment with materials, environments, and commands like shell and sweep2. :)  

 I've started to turn the geometry for my object into 3D forms, and it's going well for the most part!  So far, everything is looking the way I want it to, and I'm really having fun with the shell tool. But there's a specific piece of the object that I'm stuck on, and it's this part:  I've been trying to get rid of the part beneath the wavy bit. The waves are supposed to look like this:  I've spent a long time on this part and tried all sorts of things--I tried using the split command, boolean difference, and overall a lot of moving things around and trying things a bunch of different ways. I'll have to come back to this part, but all in all I feel myself becoming more comfortable with this program as I work on this object. :)

For the first big chunk of this project, I worked mainly in the front viewport, switching to the other ones when necessary. I had fun working this way--it kept things pretty straightforward and easy to understand. I got all of the measurements for what I think are the main bits I'll need to start extruding some curves. :)  [Front view] [Perspective view from top angle] [Perspective view from low angle, dimensions hidden]

Here are the three objects I picked out and inspected for the reverse engineered object assignment (a UFO, a little plastic container shaped like a suitcase, and a cat treat dispenser):  I ended up choosing the cat treat dispenser, because I quickly found out that there were parts to the other two items that could not be removed, as opposed to the treat dispenser which could be taken apart entirely. I think being able to measure and create each individual piece will be more challenging and rewarding for me in the end!!