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

Editing the texture


In the last section, we saw how to export the UV Layout as a bitmap file, ready to be edited in software such as GIMP or Photoshop. Now, we have to open one of those software and start painting the textures, logos, characters, and other elements that will compose the texture of the spacecraft. For our spacecraft, the texture used will be an old metallic plate, pasted over the faces as shown in the following screenshot:

When the texture is edited and saved as a PNG or JPG file (PNG is preferred in order to maintain the quality), we can apply the texture to the spacecraft in Blender 3D. To do that, we have to assign the texture to the material applied to the model.

From the Map Input menu press the UV button.

To verify that everything is placed correctly, we can open the image in the UV/Image editor and choose Textured as the draw type to be displayed in the 3D view.

If the texture shows at the 3D view, it will appear when we render the project with YafaRay.