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

Rendering and material options


In the Layers tab, let's take a look at our Freestyle options. One thing we can easily adjust is the color of our lines here:

Black is more traditional for cartoons, but you can certainly experiment. Another thing we can easily adjust is the thickness of our lines:

When we render with thicker red lines, here's what it looks like:

You can also change the types of Freestyle edges that Blender will highlight for you. For example, we'll highlight the Suggestive Contour and Ridge & Valley options:

As you can see, this has quite an interesting effect on our render:

For our robot, it just looks messy—I don't think we'll use it. But if you were doing some type of landscape or other smooth, flowing shape, it might help draw out a bit of detail.

Another option you have is to use the Ramp feature of the Blender Internal materials. This is an easy way for a material to fade from one color to another:

It can be used to simulate color changing paint, glass, or anything...