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

Setting up materials for the robot


The robot model has a metallic and shiny material, very similar to gold or bronze. To set up materials in LuxBlend, select the object in which the material shall be applied. An important thing to do before we go to LuxBlend is to make sure that the object already has a material created and assigned in Blender 3D. The settings of the materials won't be used by LuxRender, but the name and identification will be.

Select any part of the robot model that should look like metal, and apply a material in Blender 3D. Assign a name to this material, such as gold_metal, to easily identify it in LuxBlend.

When the material is created, select the object, open LuxBlend, and click on the Material tab. There we will find the options to set up the material. At the top of the interface, we will see the material name, which is being edited (see pointer 1 in the following image). Just below this option, we have the material preset type (see pointer 2 in the following image...