Blender - Lava lamp (long text post) (Patreon)

Last year I decided that in the next year, I'll be more into creating 3D models.

I've started checking out creators who's style was pleasing for my eyes, browsed their arts and tried to figure out what they were using for such creations. I joined a few new discord servers in hopes to learn more. I've found an artist who creates everything in Blender and checked out his live streaming a few times. Said person is Rush_Zilla at twitter, he might be making a bit too unrealistic proportions for my tastes, but still creating some amazing things. Watching his livestreams kinda gave me the motivation and thought that "I can do the stuff I want to create" aswell.
The other artist I was checking out prior him, was HappyOtter, who has a nice style in models imo. Altho I think he uses ZBrush for creating his models, and also Blender for the last touches and adjustments.

For starters, I need to begin with small things for practising.
Somehow I wanted to create a lava lamp, instead of going through the famous donut tutorial again. I love lava lamps and cuz of the nostalgia feels, I wanted to re-create the lamp from the sims1. Luckily I've found a good tutorial that helped me with the making.
I did not follow the video exactly how the guy was doing things in it, in terms of the looks, colours and left out the wire he made for the lamp at the end.
This is the video if someone wants to check it out: https://youtu.be/eqHQ82mnTec 

This project was good to learn a bit of animation in Blender aswell.
Also, I've met a ton of problems that kept me holding back with the process, but still made me try out things to figure out the solution to the problems. (In conclusion, it made me learn what to pay attention to in future projects xd)

After this chat with ValkyrQ, I outlined the lamp's shape I wanted to have and after a few tries in Blender to set the right viewing angle for the model creating, I was able to re-create the same looks.

On this picture above, the model had 2 materials and a light bulb inside that was viewable through the glass material.

In the tutorial video, the guy used Metaballs for the inside blobs. This type of mesh deforms whenever it gets close to the same type of mesh creating an absorbing shape when they both collide. This created the closest realistic look that a lava lamp has inside for it's floating substance. The blobs also got a transparent, coloured material on.

The guy liked the photo studio look so he created something like that in the video. Also used 1 plane for the lights, that he duplicated with the Array modifier twice. Then with the Emission shader he created light.

Then I started to have problems.
The Render window kept showing me flaws (and still with my final result I am not complitely satisfied tbh).

My original lamp kept looking like that in the Render window and I did not why, so that resulted in me creating multiple meshes, even recreating the same whole lamp model a couple of times.
On the left side, I thought the problem was with the part when I added thickness to the mesh (Solidify modifier), so the glass would have that too. I thought the problem was that I used a negative value, but then both became horrible like that.

Turns out I did not add enough (or at all?) polygons at the base of this mesh prior the modifiers I applied to it and that's why it looked so messy and cracked in the rendered view.

But on the right side, that glass was fine.
I figured out I've made a mistake, that what you see or hide in the working viewport, won't be applied to the Render window ( you have to manually check or uncheck those meshes). So every prior mesh I created of the basic lava lamp (as a security safe if I make a mistake I can go back to it) was visible inside the lava lamp and that is why the glass looked fucked up.

After this I had problems wit the metaballs that somehow turned into blocks, so creating them again fixed it. BUT THEN while working on the animation, instead of 24 fps it went with 2 fps (hiding the Subdivision modifier from the viewport fixed this). After the little animation I've made I had problems with the actual rendering again like.. how the fuck do I do that xd

I watched this video that was informative and helped me actually figuring out what to do with 168 pictures to create an animation: https://youtu.be/LPbUuMs2i20
To avoid waiting a lot, I reduced the size of this project to 60% which made it to be in 646×646 resolution. 1 second is made out of 24 frames/pictures, and 7 seconds is 168 frames. This amount took 59 mins for my pc to render.
The video linked above shows a way of merging these pictures together to be in an actual video format, but I noticed Blender made the video brighter than the actual frames it created prior.

After a quick research, I've learnt how to make the same thing in Sony Vegas, that gave me the result I wanted:

This time the video looked like as it should be and even in mp4 format.
I'll attach the video to this post or can be viewed here: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/731637329705304144/803662542600798258/lava_lamp_video_sv.mp4 

My plan is to make little things for practise that I still could use up as decoration in backgrounds if I ever get to make bigger projects. I kinda had enough of waiting for others to do models I wanna use (and make em public) so... I kinda have to make em somehow.. xd
So yea, I wanna make some proper looks and stuff with Venom and Gwen and others. I was thinking even trying to make my symbiote OCs aswell. and some Tennogen if I ever do that ha..

Thought I'd share my journey in learning Blender and what I create there, so here's the first things in 2021.
I've also rendered a pic when there's a light source from a lower lvl, hoping it would create some brighter lines between the base and glass part, but did not succeed: