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

Face normals


Before we begin, we should note an important feature for this project and all other modeling projects involving poly modeling: the face normals. Every face we create has something called normals pointing in a perpendicular direction from the face. The face normals set the visible side of the faces and can be decisive to export the model later to external renderers like YafaRay. Even if this is not a primary concern now, the normals of an object can always be verified with a simple button available in the editing panel of Blender. The following screenshot shows the location of the button:

Press the Draw Normals button and the normals will appear as small lines pointing out from the center of the faces in the 3D view of Blender.

If a model turns out to have the normals pointing toward the wrong direction, we can always change the normals with an option available in the specials menu. In edit mode, press the W key and the specials menu will appear. There we will find an option...