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

UV test grid


How will we know if the unwrapped faces aren't stretched or deformed by the process? To determine this, we use something called a test grid. It's an automated image that can be created by Blender in the UV/Image Editor window to show us how the texture is distributed over the object's surface.

To create a test grid, just press the Alt+N keys in the UV/Image Editor when a model is unwrapped. This short cut creates a new image based on some information provided in a small menu. In this menu, we can set the image to be a UV test grid by pressing the UV Test Grid button. In addition, increase the size of the image in order to produce a high quality image. For this example, the images were set to Width of 2056 pixels and a Height of 2056 pixels.

The test grid will look like an image full of small squares painted gray with small marks at the center of each square. Notice that these squares and the colors in their centers are only indented to help the visualization of the UV layout...