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

Starting the truck model


Let's start by creating the basic shape of our vehicle. We'll make this an off-road racing truck, so let's just block out the basic shapes. We'll start with the rough dimensions of the body:

Then, I'll just run a couple of loop cuts around the cab and add a slight curve to the front of the truck:

Next, I'll bevel the edges very lightly. If we were going for maximum polygon savings, we probably wouldn't bevel them at all. However, beveling doesn't add too much geometry here, and it makes the vehicle look a lot nicer.

Next, I'll add an edge split modifier to the mesh. We'll use a split angle of 47 degrees or so. I wanted to make sure all the 45 degree angles were smooth, so I just added a couple of extra degrees in case there was a weird corner in the mesh somewhere.

It's important to note that the Edge Split modifier is only temporary. Since the model is going to be exported, the smooth and flat shading will be determined by whatever game engine you end up using...