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

Preparing the scene


Before we render our robot, we'll need to set up the scene. First, we'll add a camera:

We'll position the camera for the render we'd like to create. If you're doing NPR renders, sometimes it helps to adjust your focal length down quite a bit:

This can help simulate the exaggerated proportions you might find in a comic book or other NPR products.

Next, we'll add a basic light to the scene. Unlike Cycles, Blender Internal only supports mesh lighting in a limited fashion. It's much better to use the lamps that are provided.

You can adjust the Energy of your light in the Lamp panel:

You can also choose either No Shadow or Ray Shadow. This is different than Cycles, but pretty self-explanatory. You are just choosing whether or not you want your lamp to cast shadows.

Note

The term Ray Shadow is generally only used with Blender Internal. That's because you have the option (with other types of lamps) to choose something called Buffer Shadow. A Buffer Shadow is a non-raytraced...