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 detail in an Image Editor


I recommend saving your various baked renders as separate images, and then combining them in a 2D Image Editor that supports layers (such as GIMP, Photoshop, and so on.).

Once you've combined them together in a way that you like, you can also go through and manually paint highlights, shadows, and decals onto your texture map.

For instance, I've quickly painted a basic tread pattern onto the tire:

This doesn't look particularly realistic (as a tread pattern), but it's just an example. You can easily find real tread patterns online or paint your own.

Another thing you can do is take photographs of real car parts and overlay them onto the texture image. For example, you can take a photo of a real fog light and use that:

Note

With other Blender projects, we wouldn't want to do this. The 2D image of a light will never be as good as a properly modeled lens with transparent materials. For a game model, however, we can't afford the geometry we'd need to model it; most...