Blender Tutorials to Model Mechanical Objects

[hminky]

Found these nice tutorials about making precision mechanical objects:

http://www.rab3d.com/tut_blender.php

Wish I had found some of these tutorials years ago.

Remember the first tutorial in Blender I came across about "Manipulating the Monkey".

Hope someone finds them useful.

Harold

 

[steamboateng]

Years ago, when I first got into Blender, I found this tutorial. I see it has been upgraded to Blender 2.6, which helps a lot. This is a fine tutorial for learning 'precision modeling' in Blender. I put it up there with Paul Hobb's tutes on modeling. It goes through the functions of using keyboard inputs directly for accurate modeling. Thanks for finding this tute in it's newer iteration.
Regards

 

[Cayden]

Mechanical Modelling in Blender for Trainz

(Note: In addition to this reply in the General Trainz forum, I have also posted this comment in the Trainz Content Support thread where, I think, further comment and discussion best resides.)

I think Blender has some real untapped potential for animating mechanical assets using armatures and/or constraints.

Recently I have been working through Chris Kuhn’s “Death of the Armature! Constraint-Based Rigging in Blender”. This is an eBook of tutorials (available from Amazon) designed to show how constraints may be used to animate models constructed in Blender.

With a little imagination the possibilities are probably endless. The tutorials also give an excellent and easy to follow introduction to perhaps the most useful of the 28 constraints currently available in Blender.



Here is a picture of the last, and most challenging of the tutorials in Death of the Armature, an internal combustion engine.



I have played around with the piston part of this tutorial, which uses only constraints to convert the reciprocal motion of the piston rod to the rotary motion of the wheel. The use of the Locked Track constraints is also covered nicely in this tutorial.

However, I think one gets a smoother action of the wheel using Torsten’s application of armatures, of which I based by tutorial on the rigging of an internal combustion steam driven engine. Torsten’s rigging can be found in “test_objects_v0.96.7z” which compliments his Blender Exporter for Trainz v0.96.

Another interesting source of information on using constraints for animating Blender models is the course due out next month from Explore Blender.

The introductory tutorials on this site for use of Shape keys, Modifiers, Armatures, Constraints and Drivers are easy to follow and, I think, useful for grasping the basics of these Blender features.

I hope to write some more Blender/Trainz tutorials once I have mastered the use of the various Blender constraints and applied them to modeling for Trainz.

Cayden