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

Finishing the robot


We'll add a little detail to the arm pieces now. First, I'll make sure that all my vertices are either connected or sitting slightly above the mesh they connect to:

For the wheel at the bottom, we'll use Subsurf to create a sort of futuristic tire. We'll start simple:

Remember, Subsurf will divide and smooth your mesh, so don't use too many sides to your circle originally.

Using proportional editing, I'll spin the central edge loop around the circle to create sort of an "arrow" effect to the tire:

Then, using the Bevel tool, I'll create some basic tread:

Then, I'll add Subsurf and create a basic wheel:

Now, you can go through and add some details if you'd like. I'll just do a little bit with the head here:

And add some hands:

I'm not adding a lot of detail as I do this. When you're going for more of a cartoon or NPR look, that can sometimes be counterproductive.

Note

In previous chapters, we've been pretty careful about our use of polygons. We've tried to use as few...