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

Modeling lights


For this project in particular, we will have to work with area lights. Blender 3D works with point light sources that aren't supported by LuxRender. For LuxRender we have to use area lights, which may be planes or objects that emit light energy. We will add the light sources now, and we will set the materials and light emission details in a later chapter. For our scene, there are three types of light sources:

  1. 1. Area lights created by mesh planes.

  2. 2. The eyes and legs of the robots.

  3. 3. The individual light emitter, placed on the walls and floor of the scenario.

One of those light emitters is already created, which is the eyes and legs of the robot. We must create the lights on walls and the mesh planes that will distribute the energy on the scene. The planes are really simple to create, and the only work that we'll have is the distribution of the planes along the scenario.

With the lights on the walls and floor, use the same process as the one to create the circular holes on...