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

Preparing the model and scene


Before adding materials, let's prepare our model. First, make sure that path objects have been converted to meshes with AltC.

Then, we'll combine our various parts together. In the end, I'm just going to be left with two objects: mirrored parts and non-mirrored parts. This will make the texturing a bit easier.

Note

In general, it's good practice to have the minimum number of separate objects as necessary.

Now, we'll add a basic scene to render our spacecraft. I've added a curved background here, along with a mesh lamp and a camera:

Obviously, this is a very simple scene. You could get far more complex with it, but this will work to show off the model.

By pressing  0 on the number pad, you can now look through your camera.

Make sure that your background is large enough and that you see exactly what you want. You may need to adjust the position of various objects.

Now, we'll add an Emission material for our light:

When we switch to the rendered view, we can...