Book Image

Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines

Book Image

Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines

Overview of this book

Blender 3D provides all the features you need to create super-realistic 3D models of machines for use in artwork, movies, and computer games. Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines gives you step-by-step instructions for building weapons, vehicles, robots, and more. This book will show you how to use Blender 3D for mechanical modeling and product visualization. Through the pages of the book, you will find a step-by-step guide to create three different projects: a fantasy weapon, a spacecraft, and a giant robot. Even though these machines are not realistic, you will be able to build your own sensible and incredible machines with the techniques that you will learn in this book along with the exercises and examples. All the three sections of this book, which cover three projects, are planned to have an increasing learning curve. The first project is about a hand weapon, and with that we can image a small-sized object with tiny details. This first part of the book will show you how to deal with these details and model them in Blender 3D. In the second project, we will create a spacecraft, adding a bit of scale to the project, and new materials and textures as well. With this project, we will be working with metal, glass, and other elements that make the spacecraft. Along with the object, a new space environment will be created in the book too. At the end we have a big and complex object, which is the transforming robot. This last part of the book will cover the modeling of two objects and show how you can make one transform into the other. The scale and number of objects in this project are quite big, but the same principles as in the other projects are applied here with a step-by-step guide on how to go through the workflow of the project.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Chapter 8. Advanced UV Mapping

In this chapter, we will learn how to add a few extra details with textures, which can be a great help in any modeling project. For our spacecraft, the textures will add objects and textures that could make the overall model hard to finish. One advantage of using a great set of textures to create details is the ability to use images instead of models to create geometry. This is possible because textures create shadows and the impression of depth in models.

UV mapping in Blender

The textures in Blender are divided into two main types: procedural textures and image-based textures. With procedural textures, the organization and distribution of textures along the 3D object is rather simple, and all we have to do is choose the type of mapping that fits the shape of the object such as a cube, cylinder, and so on. However, with image-based textures, it's harder to control exactly where each part of the image texture will be placed.

If we have an image texture to place...