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

Adding light to the scene


For this scene, we will use two area lights to simulate the overall light of a real studio. This is a common technique used to light up those environments with a set of spots organized as a plane of light. We can create an Area lamp in Blender with the Lamp option in the toolbox.

When the Area lamp is created, it will be pointing down. With the rotate transformation, change the orientation of the lamp and make it parallel to the X or Y axis. The Area lamp must be placed on the side of the background we just created.

As the Area lamp is too small, we have to make it bigger. With the Area lamp, we have to always change the size of the lamp at the shading panel, which can be opened by using the F5 key. There we will find the Size option to change the size of the lamp.

Increase the size of the lamp until it looks like following image. For this image, the size of 5 units was used.

The last step is to duplicate the lamp using the Shift+D keys when the object...