Blender Tutorial

Making half a Donut

First, in FRONT VIEW (NUM 1) create a cylinder. I left the default value (32) in, because then the circle will be nicely divided in two halfs.

Next, change to TOP VIEW (NUM 7) and select the bottom circle of the cylinder and delete the vertices (x -> vertices)

Then, still in edit mode select all the remaining vertices and move them down, so they lie on the xz-Plane.

In FRONT VIEW change to Object mode and move the whole object to the right along the x-axis. How much will depend on what inner radius you want to have for the donut.

Now back to TOP VIEW and back in edit mode choose the appropriate settings in the edit buttons for the Degr and the steps. I chose 300 degrees, leaving a 60 deg. angle open and 30 steps. This means that one step spins the circle by 10 degrees.

In FRONT VIEW select the vertices of the bottom half, excluding the center vertices lying on the xy-plane.

And delete them. (XKEY ->vertices)

Now we have lost the bottom, making our donut hollow, so we will have to cover the bottom again.

Add a circle with 36 vertices.

Scale until it fits the inner circle of the donut-shape.

I had to rotate a bit to make the segments fit.

Now extrude and immediately after hitting EKEY, hit SKEY to scale until you reach the outer circle of the donut shape.

Now delete the superfluous vertices.

Turning solid viewing on, the bottom now should look like this.

We need to add a center line, easiest way is with a loop subdivide (CTRL+RKEY).

Now we want to join the two parts of the mesh, merging the points. Select the bottom row of the vertices and the extruded circle-shape. In the edit buttons raise the limit a bit and then press Rem Doubles. (or WKEY -> Remove Doubles)

Now we have a nice half-donut shape.

Now I did some tweaking by smothing the top vertices. What I did was basically to keep the vertices on the cuts solid and smoothed the rest of the vertices. It's not difficult but it took some playing around.

Hope you liked the tutorial, come back soon for more ;).