Book Image

Blender 3D Incredible Machines

By : Christopher Kuhn, Allan Brito
5 (1)
Book Image

Blender 3D Incredible Machines

5 (1)
By: Christopher Kuhn, Allan Brito

Overview of this book

Blender 3D is one of the top pieces of 3D animation software. Machine modeling is an essential aspect of war games, space games, racing games, and animated action films. As the Blender software grows more powerful and popular, there is a demand to take your modeling skills to the next level. This book will cover all the topics you need to create professional models and renders. This book will help you develop a comprehensive skill set that covers the key aspects of mechanical modeling. Through this book, you will create many types of projects, including a pistol, spacecraft, robot, and a racer. We start by making a Sci-fi pistol, creating its basic shape and adding details to it. Moving on, you’ll discover modeling techniques for larger objects such as a space craft and take a look at how different techniques are required for freestyle modeling. After this, we’ll create the basic shapes for the robot and combine the meshes to create unified objects. We'll assign materials and explore the various options for freestyle rendering. We’ll discuss techniques to build low-poly models, create a low-poly racer, and explain how they differ from the high poly models we created previously. By the end of this book, you will have mastered a workflow that you will be able to apply to your own creations.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Blender 3D Incredible Machines
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Sci-Fi Pistol - Creating the Basic Shapes

Unwrapping and baking


Once you have your basic materials created, we'll need to UV unwrap (or just unwrap) the truck. We briefly touched on this earlier in the book, but it's more important now.

If you're not familiar with the idea of UV unwrapping, it's really pretty simple. Our model exists in 3D space, but it will be using a 2D image texture (eventually). We need to tell Blender how to apply that 2D image to our 3D object. When we talk about unwrapping, you can think of it as a paper model. We need to cut and unfold the model so that it lies flat:

Note

UV unwrapping is a non-destructive process. You don't change or damage your 3D model at all. The traditional coordinates (XY, and Z) still define the location of your vertices in 3D space. A second set of coordinates (U and V) will define how those vertices are mapped to a 2D image. This is why it's called a UV Map.

A simple way to unwrap any model is to select everything and then press U. When the UV Mapping menu appears, select Smart...