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

Rendering with LuxRender


In the first two projects of the book, we used YafaRay to add extra realism to the project by using advanced lighting and materials. For the robot project, we will also use advanced ray tracing techniques, but not with YafaRay. The render engine that we will be using for the robot is called LuxRender, and it's another powerful option we use to create realistic images with Blender 3D.

LuxRender is a render engine that uses unbiased methods to calculate light, which means it's physically based. All light interactions and effects are based on real interactions, which makes it easy for us to produce realistic images. For this project, we will learn how to install and set up materials and lights to render with LuxRender.

A great feature of LuxRender, as compared to YafaRay, is the ability to pause and resume the render at any time. The rendered solution is saved to a file and can even resume the render in another computer.