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 for external applications


Up to this point, all the models we've done have been strictly for Blender use. In other words, we knew that all of the texturing, rendering, and animation would be done completely within the Blender software. However, sometimes you'll want to create 3D models for use in external programs.

For instance, Blender is an excellent tool for creating 3D game models. You can build and texture the model in Blender and then export it to other formats. Let's take a quick look at our export menu to see what options we have:

These are the formats that Blender can directly export to (and there are more that can be activated with add-ons). Additionally, there are other methods (some online) that can be used to convert one model format to another. Many game and simulation platforms also have import functions, allowing you to bring in a model from another format.

When you're talking about export and conversion, it's important to note that not everything carries over from...