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

Cutting shapes into our gun


To add detail (and enhance realism), we'll want to cut various shapes into the side of our gun. First, we want to create a circular cut-out in the middle of the body. Let's start by adding a circle in the Object model and lining it up where we'd like the cut to go:

Next, we're going to add a Shrinkwrap modifier to the circle. This is an incredibly powerful modifier to create cuts or recesses in mechanical parts.

We need to first select the name of our gun object in the Target box. Then, we'll need to set the mode to Project. Finally, we'll need to specify the axis that we'd like it to project on. In this case, it will be the X axis.

Once these settings are selected, you can drag the circle up against the gun, and it will conform to this shape.

Note

The more geometry (vertices/edges/faces) an object has, the better it will be able to conform to the shape of something else.

Let's pick our gun object again, and Tab back into Edit mode. We want to run a couple of...