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

Circles, angles, and edge splits


If your Edge Split modifier is set to 30° (by default), then you should never add circular shapes with less than 13 sides to them. Why? Because a 360-degree circle divided by 13 sides equals approximately 27.7° per side.

Any fewer sides and your angles are going to break the 30° mark and become sharp. So, 13 is the mathematical minimum. In practice, however, it's not an easy number to work with.

You can't cut it into halves or thirds, and each angle is a long decimal number (27.6923076...). This makes it hard to rotate something (such as a cut out) around a cylinder by "one side".

Instead, I suggest using a minimum of 16 sides per circle. It's easily divisible by factors of 2, and the angles work out nicely.

Next, we'll add a Shrinkwrap modifier to our circle object, and press it up against the gun. This is exactly the same process that we just used cut out the large circle.

Just like before, apply the Shrinkwrap modifier when you're done, and then join...