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

Working with Path objects


The last technique we'll cover in this chapter is using Path objects. These are ideal for making wires, cables, hoses, and more. To get started, just add one from the Curve section of your Add menu:

From the Path section of your Properties panel, you can see that we have a number of options that we need to look at. The Preview Resolution shows you how many segments your Path will be broken down into:

This is very important. If your Path is going to have a lot of curves to it, you'll need a decent resolution to make it look smooth. On the other hand, it should be obvious that the higher the resolution, the more polygons you'll eventually be using.

Also, don't be fooled by the concept of Preview Resolution. This is (or will be) your actual resolution. The Preview term just means that if you were to leave it as a Path object and render it, you could choose a different resolution for render time than in the 3D viewport.

Eventually, we'll want to turn our Paths into...