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

General workflow for detailing


As you do more modeling projects, you'll find that there are certain processes that you use very often. Here's a quick workflow for creating small mechanical details:

  • Add the basic shapes.

  • Do your "big" beveling to add curves.

  • Do your "small" beveling on the sharp edges.

Next, we'll add some pipe-style detailingto our gun. Torus objects are fantastic for creating pipes.

Unlike other types of conduits (hoses, cables, and more), pipes largely consist of straight cylinders. Since they only have curves at certain points, an extruded section of a torus is a great solution. It gives you perfect angles without adding unnecessary polygons.

To do this, let's first add Torus to the scene. We'll use 48 Major Segments (by default) and 16 Minor Segments .

Major Segments is the numberof edges around the larger circle. Minor Segments is the number of edges around the tube that makes up the torus.

Let's start by deleting three quarters of the torus:

This will...