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

Using smart projections


Smart projections is the tool that allows us to create fast UV layouts and unfold a mesh with only a few mouse clicks. To use the tool, select a 3D mesh model and change the work mode to the edit mode. All operations that use UV mapping of a 3D model are created in a window called UV/Image Editor. Create a new window in the Blender 3D interface, and change the window type to UV/Image Editor.

After opening the UV/Image Editor window and setting the work mode to edit, select all objects of the 3D model, such as vertices, edges, or faces, and press the U key. It will open the Unwrap menu with several options.

In this menu, we will find the Unwrap (smart projections) tool at the bottom.

If we choose the smart projections tool, a new menu will appear. In this menu, we can choose several options to control the way in which all projections are created. It's not as flexible as working with seams, but with this option, a few aspects of the tool can be controlled.

The menu...