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

Checking the Texture Map


After we're done, we can test out the material/textures in Blender. We'll use the texture map to create some Cycles materials and ensure that everything lines up properly.

You can start by just adding a basic background, lighting setup, and camera:

Then, we'll create our materials. For instance, here is a quick car paint material using the texture image:

For the tire, we can also use that texture image to map to the Displacement:

For increased realism, you can also create a separate image map for this purpose. Rather than showing colors/textures, it will only show the Normals or Displacement that we want on various parts of the truck. Here's a quick example of a normal map in use:

And here's a quick version of the truck that uses normal maps to add damage/detail to the body (Render Credit: James Clayton):

Feel free to experiment with separate Displacement/normal maps. However, keep in mind that every image you have to load will increase render time and place...