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

Adding details


As we build our model, it's generally good practice to use as few polygons and vertices as possible. However, you may sometimes decide that it isn't worth it. For instance, you can technically save two polygons by filling in the fender area in a nonstandard way:

This tends to look a bit messy, though, and can sometimes make it difficult to see how meshes are put together. You'll have to decide how important polygon efficiency is for your application. In this case, I don't feel that saving two polygons is worth it. The final truck is around 5,000 polygons (as mentioned before), so we're talking about less than a 1% decrease in efficiency here (0.04%, actually).

At this point, we've completed the basic shape of our truck body. You can see where we're at in terms of polygons and vertices.

One thing we haven't really discussed yet is triangles. We've talked about using triangular faces ("Tris"), but that leads us to a larger point. The reality (at least in most programs) is that...