For years I’ve been trying to do some interesting things in 3D, but I found that my artistic skills are not always up to snuff. This week, however, I found a great tutorial on using Blender. If you are not familiar with Blender, it is an open source 3d modeling and animation tool that is in the vein of Maya or 3DMax. About 7 years ago I tried to use Blender and it had major problems with stability and reliability. I had completely forgotten about it, until got a 3D printer recently. I realized that the types of things I wanted to make were not suited for creation in SketchUp, and so I downloaded the latest blender. Overall, it was just as complex as I remembered but I found a few tutorials on YouTube, including one to create a coffee cup. While the video was a bit dated, not quite matching the latest version of blender, it did a great job of explaining the process. My opinion of Blender has gone up a lot, and I look forward to building the pieces to my board game I’ve been developing.