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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Design, model, and texture complex mechanical objects in Blender
About This Book
- Develop realistic and awesome machines for your 3D projects and animation films
- Gain the ability to look at a piece of machinery in real life and then recreate it in Blender
- Develop a comprehensive skill set covering key aspects of mechanical modeling
Who This Book Is For
This book is intended for consumers and hobbyists who are existing users of Blender 3D want to expand their capabilities by diving into machine modeling with Blender 3D. You are expected to have experience with basic Blender operations.
What You Will Learn
- Reacquaint yourself with Blender's modeling toolset
- Practice fundamental skills that are applicable to a range of modeling projects
- Know when and where to use various types of geometry—something that saves time in one instance will pose significant problems in another
- Think ahead and plan your project out to significantly improve both quality and efficiency
- Create models for freestyle use
- Overcome challenging modeling problems
- Create customized game models that can easily be exported to other formats. This is one of the most popular uses of Blender, and the results can be incorporated into game design!
- Get comfortable with the start-to-finish process to create any type of hard surface model
In Detail
Blender 3D is one of the top pieces of 3D animation software. Machine modeling is an essential aspect of war games, space games, racing games, and animated action films. As the Blender software grows more powerful and popular, there is a demand to take your modeling skills to the next level. This book will cover all the topics you need to create professional models and renders.
This book will help you develop a comprehensive skill set that covers the key aspects of mechanical modeling. Through this book, you will create many types of projects, including a pistol, spacecraft, robot, and a racer. We start by making a Sci-fi pistol, creating its basic shape and adding details to it. Moving on, you'll discover modeling techniques for larger objects such as a space craft and take a look at how different techniques are required for freestyle modeling.
After this, we'll create the basic shapes for the robot and combine the meshes to create unified objects. We'll assign materials and explore the various options for freestyle rendering. We'll discuss techniques to build low-poly models, create a low-poly racer, and explain how they differ from the high poly models we created previously.
By the end of this book, you will have mastered a workflow that you will be able to apply to your own creations.
Style and approach
This is an easy-to-follow book that is based around four concrete projects. Each topic is explained sequentially in the process of creating a model, and detailed explanations of the basic and advanced features are also included.
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Seitenzahl: 147
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Blender 3D Incredible Machines
Blender 3D Incredible Machines
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
Publishing Month: February 2016
Production reference: 1180216
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham
B3 2PB, UK.
ISBN 978-1-78528-201-0
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Author
Christopher Kuhn
Copy Editor
Charlotte Carneiro
Reviewer
Jacek Herman
Project Coordinator
Kinjal Bari
Commissioning Editor
Priya Singh
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor
Divya Poojari
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Content Development Editor
Trusha Shriyan
Graphics
Jason Monteiro
Technical Editor
Murtaza Tinwala
Production Coordinator
Melwyn Dsa
About the Author
Christopher Kuhn is a 3D artist and Blender enthusiast. He has been heavily involved in the Blender community since 2010. His company, Kuhn Industries LLC, creates custom 3D assets and educational materials for both professional and non professional uses. In addition to his 3D courses on https://cgcookie.com/, he's written two previous books on Blender (Build Your Own Rocket Bike and Death to the Armatures).
About the Reviewer
Jacek Herman is a Master of Fine Arts, 3D generalist and Blender enthusiast. He spends most of his time locked in a basement, building game assets from scratch or designing 3D printable junk. He specializes in tedious craft of UV texturing ridiculously large models.
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Preface
Welcome to Blender 3D Incredible Machines. In this book, we're going to explore the world of hard-surface modeling in Blender. This is distinct from organic modeling (creating humans/animals, and more), and there are different methods that we can employ to get the best results. We'll focus on ways to create complex machinery, vehicles, and other similar models in Blender.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Sci-Fi Pistol – Creating the Basic Shapes, covers the basic modeling tools as we start our first project. It should be a good refresher for more experienced users, and will set the groundwork for more advanced modeling projects.
Chapter 2, Sci-Fi Pistol – Adding Details, looks at specific modeling techniques for adding detail to hard surface models. These techniques will be used to finish building our gun model, but will be applicable to many other projects as well.
Chapter 3, Texturing and Rendering Your Sci-Fi Pistol, takes a look at the Cycles rendering engine and how to create basic materials for it. We'll also set up a basic render scene that we can use in the future.
Chapter 4, Spacecraft – Creating the Basic Shapes, begins a more complex modeling project—a Sci-Fi spacecraft. We'll focus more on general technique and workflow here, since we covered a lot of the basic tools already in the first two chapters.
Chapter 5, Spacecraft – Adding Details, focuses heavily on detail-oriented modeling techniques. We'll look at important considerations when adding detail to a model as well as a number of tools and procedures for doing so.
Chapter 6, Spacecraft – Materials, Textures, and Rendering, builds on the techniques from our last project. We'll create a number of different materials for our spacecraft. We'll also briefly cover UV mapping and managing materials slots.
Chapter 7, Modeling Your Freestyle Robot, looks at modeling for a specific type of rendering—FreeStyle. There are a number of special modeling techniques we'll want to use to get the best possible results.
Chapter 8, Robot – Freestyle Rendering, looks at the specifics of FreeStyle rendering. We'll also cover the creation on non-photorealistic (NPR) rendering in the Blender Internal render engine.
Chapter 9, Low-Poly Racer – Building the Mesh, takes a look at one of the more common uses of Blender—building game models. We'll explore how these models are different from the ones we've already done and what specific techniques we should use (and avoid) when we do it.
Chapter 10, Low-Poly Racer – Materials and Textures, covers the creation of materials and textures for our low-poly game model. We'll cover UV maps more extensively, and see how we can use them to create a more universal form of textures. This will allow our game assets to be used in a variety of external applications.
What you need for this book
A desktop or laptop computer (recommend at least 4 GB of RAM).
Windows 7, Mac OS X, or Linux.
The Blender 3D software package, free to download at https://www.blender.org/.
Who this book is for
This book is aimed at intermediate Blender users looking to increase their hard surface modeling skills. Although we do review some basic tools in the first chapter, this isn't meant to be an introduction to the Blender software package. Users should be reasonably familiar with the interface and fundamental concepts of 3D modeling (moving, rotating, scaling, and others).
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "This will allow us to add the Mirror modifier."
Note
Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.
Tip
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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Downloading the color images of this book
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Errata
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Questions
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Chapter 1. Sci-Fi Pistol - Creating the Basic Shapes
In this section, we'll cover a few introductory topics, discuss our goals for the project, and then create the basic shape of a pistol. As we do this, we'll use a number of different tools and modifiers. At the end of this section, we'll be ready to move on and detail our pistol:
Welcome to Blender 3D Incredible Machines.
In this book, we'll be working through a series of Blender projects aimed at increasing your modeling, texturing, and rendering skills.
Before we jump right into it, there are a few quick things that we need to cover.
First of all, I should mention that this book isn't meant for absolute beginners.
It would be great if a single volume could take you from knowing nothing about the software to cranking out sophisticated 3D models; unfortunately, this is not realistic. Blender's an incredible piece of software, but it's also complex. The sheer number of features means that learning to use it (or at least, learning to use it well) is a long-term endeavor. The best Blender modelers in the world will tell you that they always discover something new.
So, who exactly is the target audience?
In terms of skill level, this book will be most useful to intermediate users. Among other things, an intermediate user can do the following:
This book is called Blender 3D Incredible Machines for a reason. We're going to focus on building sophisticated mechanical models here, which means that invariably, there are certain topics that we won't cover.
There's nothing in here about creating realistic fur or setting up materials to simulate human skin. While these are fascinating topics, they're beyond the scope of this book (and frankly, I don't feel qualified to teach you about them).
As you get started with our first project, you'll find that the instructions are detailed and specific. However, as we move further along, this will become less true. This avoids repetition and also allows us to pull back and see the big picture. We can start focusing on workflow and project management, which is critical when building complex models.
There's one last thing I'd like to mention before we jump into it. In a lot of Blender tutorials, you build models based on reference or background images. This is incredibly useful when you model a real object, but everything in this book is fictional. We want to focus on technique and workflow here and leave ourselves some flexibility on the designs. Therefore, we're going to build everything in a freehand manner. However, if you'd prefer to work from a reference image, blueprints for all the models are provided at the back of this book.
This pretty much wraps up our introductory topics...so, if you're ready, let's get to work!
A project overview
For our first project, we'll be modeling a high poly, sci-fi weapon. It's approximately the same shape as a modern day handgun, but it gives us the flexibility to be creative and explore different modeling techniques.
Here's an example of what the final model will look like (without materials and textures):
In this first chapter, we'll create the basic beveled shapes of our gun. We'll start by extruding some basic shapes. Next, we'll add the main body of the gun, then move on to the additional pieces. As we do this, we'll look at a number of modifiers and mesh tools. Specifically, we'll be discussing the following topics:
When we're finished with this section, our project will look like this:
If you're ready, let's open a new scene in Blender and get started!
Creating the barrel
We'll start by adding a circle to our scene (press Shift + A to access the Add menu). By default, circles are added with 32 sides (and 32 vertices). This screenshot will work just fine for us:
Next, we'll rotate the circle by 90° on the X axis (R, 90, X, and Enter). Then, we'll apply our rotation and scale by pressing Ctrl + A and selecting Rotation & Scale. We want to apply the rotation here for Blender to be aware of the object's default orientation. This is relevant to several tools and modifiers that we'll be using. We need to apply the scale for the same reason. For instance, the Bevel tool often doesn't work properly when objects do not have their scale values applied. We'll discuss this in detail in the later sections. For now, go ahead and apply your rotation and scale to the circle as shown here:
Now, we'll switch to the Front view with 1 on the numpad. We'll then go into Edit mode by hitting the Tab key. Switch to Vertex selection mode by using Ctrl + Tab:
Next, we'll use Shift + D to duplicate them. We'll scale the new circle down using the S key and drag the cursor to the middle of the circle. This smaller circle will form the inside of the barrel and allow us to make changes to the outer circle without losing track of the center (and vertices) of the original one.
Next, we'll start deleting some vertices that we don't want. The outside of the barrel will not be a perfect circle, so we'll need to change it. First, we'll delete three vertices at both the top and bottom of the circle. To do this, we'll select the ones that we don't want any longer, and then hit X
