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

Manifold versus non-manifold meshes


Before going further, there's an important topic we need to touch on. Right now, we can see the back side of our body panels from certain angles. In other words, when you look into the wheel well, you can see the back side of the faces that make up the truck's tailgate.

This generally isn't a good thing, because it reveals the single-sided nature of the faces (and can sometimes have odd effects on your shading and materials). However, you can often get away with it in Blender. If you happened to see the back side of a body panel during an animation, it would be hidden in shadows and probably wouldn't look too bad. This is especially true with a low-poly model like this, where you're not expecting perfect realism.

The problem is that some game engines aren't as forgiving as Blender. To increase rendering efficiency and reduce CPU/GPU workload, they simply don't render the back side of polygons. Instead, it will appear that those faces are missing from the...