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 the body with Subdivision Surfacing


For the body, we're going to use a modifier that we haven't talked about yet—Subdivision Surfacing.

More experienced users may find it odd that we're waiting until this part of the book before using Subdivision Surfacing (or Subsurf, as its commonly referred to). After all, it's a tool that many people use frequently.

So, let's talk about that.

Subsurf works by dividing and smoothing a mesh. For instance, let's add a basic Cube shape for the body of our robot:

Next, let's add a Subsurf modifier to it:

Subsurf has divided and smoothed our cube. The more layers of Subdivision Surfacing you add, the smoother it gets:

A very important note, however, is that with each layer of subsurfing, the polygon count goes up quite a bit:

This can be quickly illustrated with a graph:

In practice, it would be rare to add more than two or three levels of Subdivision Surfacing. Still, the polygon count is one of the main drawbacks to it. Subsurf is a quick way...