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

Refining our ship


We'll work though the spacecraft one section at a time, adding detail until it's finished.

Let's start by moving everything but the main body to another layer. Then, we'll select the portions of the body that we want to remove (to create gaps in the hull) and delete them:

We can use AltS to scale in some edges, then rip them with the V key:

I'm also going to use the Inset tool to create a door (or hatch) on the side of the ship:

Then, I'll just bevel those edges so that they're more rounded:

Next, we'll create a series of cutout shapes to use for the top of the hull (just like we did on our gun model):

Using the same techniques from Chapter 2Sci Fi Pistol – Adding Details, we'll cut those pieces into our hull:

I'd like to point out that I've cheated a little bit here. Earlier in the book, I said you should never use N-Gons in curved areas. That's an excellent rule of thumb, but there are times when you can get away with it. For instance, I've done it here:

That...