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 materials


Materials in Blender Internal work a lot differently than they do in Cycles. In some ways, it's easier and more straightforward.

Cycles gives you a lot of preset shaders (GlassGlossyDiffuse, and Emission) and more. Blender Internal doesn't work that way. Instead, you manually configure the properties for each shader. You select your diffuse color, specular color, specular intensity (shininess), hardness of specularity (how smoothly the shiny parts blend into the rest of the material), and more.

You also have a number of different shading options. Since we're going for a cartoon look to our robot, we'll pick the Toon shader for both our Diffuse and Specular (glossy) shaders. You can adjust the various settings until the preview material looks approximately the way you'd like:

When you've got a decent setup, go ahead and try a quick render:

One thing you may notice here is that the scene renders significantly faster than it did in Cycles. We're not getting the added...