Learning Blender - Coffee Cup

This is our blog on learning Blender.  We ordered a new laptop from System76 but it hasn't come yet so we're getting started on an old Dell.  The render time for this benchmark (image at right) was 29.5 minutes! The new computer should be around 2.5 minutes.

We're starting with this coffee cup beginner tutorial.  Here are our thoughts while doing the tutorial:

• It would be nice if the narrator in the video told us why he is selecting certain options so we can start learning the details.
• When scaling (pressing S and moving mouse or typing number plus enter), Ctrl-Z didn't work to undo the scale. Alt-S will reset the scale to the value when it was created.
• We finished the coffee cup and rendered it with 500 samples (it took 20 minutes!), and here it is!