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 materials and textures


Now, it's time to add some materials to our gun!

We'll add a basic one first and call in Gun_Main_Paint. One thing we want to do is adjust the Viewport Color setting so that we can see which materials are assigned to the various parts of our model. Because it's the only material on our gun right now, the entire gun will change its color to match what you've selected.

Note

Changing the Viewport Color does not affect the actual color of the material (at the render time). It simply changes what shows up in your 3D window.

We'd like our gun to be a little shiny, so let's switch from Diffuse Shading to Glossy Shading in our materials tab. Using the Rendered preview, you can adjust the Roughness and Color of the material until it looks the way you like.

You also have the option to switch between the BeckmanGCXSharp, and Ashikhmin-Shirley types of shading. Each of these reflects light somewhat differently and you must feel free to experiment. For this model, however...