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 cables and wires


A spacecraft without some cables and wires would look weird; even a steampunk machine needs some cables and wires to look like a real machine. But, as we are dealing with a sci-fi vehicle, there is nothing wrong with placing those cables and wires outside of the wing shell. The best way to create cables and wires in Blender is by using a combination of curves and surfaces with a tool called BevOb. With this option, we can draw a curve and determine the shape of the wire with a surface.

It works just like an extrusion along a path, with the option to later convert this geometry to mesh and apply the same modifiers and tools that we are used to work with shapes like planes and primitive meshes.

Using curves

To use curves, we have to add a new type of object that hasn't been used in this book so far—the curve object. The process of manipulating a curve is different from a mesh object, and that's why we need to keep a few things in mind. There are three types of curves...