Book Image

Blender 3D Incredible Machines

By : Christopher Kuhn, Allan Brito
Book Image

Blender 3D Incredible Machines

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

Adding decals with UV maps


Next, let's add a few decals. Most large vehicles tend to have words, symbols, or logos on them. We can do this easily using UV maps.

Note

UV mapping tells Blender how to apply a two-dimensional image to three-dimensional objects.

Later in the book, we'll use UV mapping to unwrap and texture an entire model, and we'll look at the different settings and options. In this case, however, we're just using it selectively to apply a few decals to the model.

We can pick an area of the ship where we'd like to have writing or a decal. The easiest way to unwrap areas for decal use is to line up the faces so that they're roughly flat in the 3D viewport (you can also use Shift7 to precisely align the view to your faces). Then, you can press U to bring up the Unwrap menu; select Project from View:

In the UV/Image Editor, you can now align those faces with an image of your choice:

You can assign multiple parts of the model to the same area of an image. If a decal is repeated...