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

Creating small details


Next, let's make some small parts. These things will be duplicated and placed all over the ship, so it's easier to just model one of each and then move them into position. The more copies of each one that you plan to make, the lower you should keep the polygon count:

Before duplicating, of course, we'll want to add our materials:

Here's where I ended up putting the RCS/OMS thrusters (on 1/2 the ship):

The thrusters can be any size (scale) that they need to be, but the handles and lights are a little different. These should be related to the size of a human. To make sure we get this right before making a lot of copies, we can just add a quick human model to our scene (or at the very least, just a cube that's as tall as a person would be):

This will give you a good sense of scale and allow you to get your little details right. For instance, it wouldn't make sense if the EVA handles were larger than a human. Nor would it make sense if the running lights were larger...