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

Building the landing gear


We'll do the landing struts together, but you can feel free to finish off the actual skids yourself:

I kept mine pretty simple, compared to other parts of the ship:

Once you've got the skid plate done, make sure to make it a separate object (if it's not already). We're going to use a neat trick to finish this up.

Make a copy of the landing gear part and move it to the rear section (or front, if you modeled the rear). Then, under your Mesh tab, you can assign both of these objects the same mesh data:

Now, whenever you make a change to one of them, the change will carry over to the other as well.

Of course, you could just model one and then duplicate it, but sometimes it's nice to see how the part will look in multiple locations. For instance, the cutouts are slightly different between the front and back of the ship. As you're modeling it, you'll want to make sure that it will fit both areas.

The first detail we'll add is a mounting bracket for our struts to go on...