Book excerpt: 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.