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

Creating materials


Now, it's time to set up our materials. The first thing I'll do is split my screen into three parts—the 3D Viewport,Node Editor, and Materials Tab:

This is just a personal preference, but it does give you access to everything you'll need in order to adjust your materials.

Before going further, let's take a look at some of the basic procedural textures that come with Blender:

As you can see, I've used these textures to affect the displacement or normal of the material. The textures are basically acting as normal maps.

Note

A normal map is a way to add additional detail to the model without physically building it. For example, if you wanted a cloth pattern, it would not be practical to model a cloth with all of the tiny folds and stitching. Normal mapping allows us to simulate the light and shadows of a complex surface without adding all of the geometry to model it.

You can use a texture to control the normal map by plugging its output into the Displacement input of the material...