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

Starting with a background image


The first step to start the modeling is to add the reference image as the background of the Blender 3D view. To do that, we can go to the View menu in the 3D view and choose Background Image. The background image in Blender appears only when we are at an orthogonal or Camera view.

The background image is a simple black and white drawing of the weapon, but it will be a great reference for modeling.

Before we go any further, it's important to point out a few things about the Background Image menu. We can make some adjustments to the image if it doesn't fit our Blender view:

  • Use: With this button turned on, we will use the image as a background. If you want to hide the image, just turn it off and the image will disappear.

  • Blend: The blend slider will control the transparency of the image. If you feel that the image is actually blocking your view of the whole model, making it a bit transparent may help.

  • Size: As the name says, we can control the scale...