Book Image

Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines

Book Image

Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines

Overview of this book

Blender 3D provides all the features you need to create super-realistic 3D models of machines for use in artwork, movies, and computer games. Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines gives you step-by-step instructions for building weapons, vehicles, robots, and more. This book will show you how to use Blender 3D for mechanical modeling and product visualization. Through the pages of the book, you will find a step-by-step guide to create three different projects: a fantasy weapon, a spacecraft, and a giant robot. Even though these machines are not realistic, you will be able to build your own sensible and incredible machines with the techniques that you will learn in this book along with the exercises and examples. All the three sections of this book, which cover three projects, are planned to have an increasing learning curve. The first project is about a hand weapon, and with that we can image a small-sized object with tiny details. This first part of the book will show you how to deal with these details and model them in Blender 3D. In the second project, we will create a spacecraft, adding a bit of scale to the project, and new materials and textures as well. With this project, we will be working with metal, glass, and other elements that make the spacecraft. Along with the object, a new space environment will be created in the book too. At the end we have a big and complex object, which is the transforming robot. This last part of the book will cover the modeling of two objects and show how you can make one transform into the other. The scale and number of objects in this project are quite big, but the same principles as in the other projects are applied here with a step-by-step guide on how to go through the workflow of the project.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Blender 3D 2.49 Incredible Machines
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Materials and textures in YafaRay


With the background settings covered, we can begin working on the materials of the spacecraft. If the project is rendered with YafaRay, the advantage is that YafaRay uses all of the settings from the Blender materials and textures, especially if we have UV textures. In this case, UV textures are required to make image-based textures appear in YafaRay. As we have already set up this type of texture for the model, it's only a matter of choosing shades and overall settings for the object.

Let's open the Material tab of YafaRay and choose a material preset from the drop-down menu.

Setting up a metal material

For metal materials that reflect the environment, we can use the glossy option. First, select any part of the model that will receive a metal material such as the wings. Among all settings in this material type, we will mostly use the Glossy reflection and Exponent to create the metal. Change the Glossy reflection to 0.3 and the Exponent to 500. The first...