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

Posing the robot


Now that we know how to create pivots with and without empties, it's time to set up the joints of the robot. The process of adding pivot points to the robot will allow us to easily create a retracted form of the robot and a humanoid shape. The following image shows the robot in both forms. With that in mind, we will set up the pivots to move all parts of the robot in order to create and change shapes easily.

Before anything else, we have to duplicate all parts of the robot and create its humanoid shape. The humanoid shape of the robot will be easier to set up and more familiar to add the required joints and place pivots.

To create the setup for the robot, we will add empties along the identified positions where we should have a joint. Those places are marked in the following image:

Set up the hierarchy of the objects, following the arrows shown in the last image. This will make the pelvis of the robot a controlling object for all of the objects in the hierarchy. Every time...