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

Do it yourself - completing the body


Next, let's take a look at the key areas that we have left to model:

The bottom of the ship and the Sensor Suite (on the nose) are good opportunities to practice on your own. They use identical techniques to areas of the ship we've already done. Go ahead and see what you can do!

For the record, here's what I ended up doing with the Sensor Suite:

And here's what I did with the bottom. You can see that I copied that circular piece from the top of the engine area:

One of the nice things about a project like this is that you can start to copy parts from one area to another. It's unlikely that both the top and bottom of the ship would be shown in the same render (or shot), so you can probably get away with borrowing quite a bit. Even if you did see them simultaneously, it's not unreasonable to think that a ship would have more than one of certain components.

Of course, that's just a way to make things quicker (and easier). If you'd like everything to be...