Modeling and Rendering a Windmill

First, and every experienced Blender Artist will tell you this so much it’s annoying, Get a Reference Image! You will notice a huge spike in your Renders’ quality if you use a Reference image. Try to get one where the camera is almost square on with the windmill as we are going to be using it mainly for proportions.

Now, with the pole out of the way, we can start with the blades. Add a plane and rotate it by 90 degrees.

Start moving the vertices around to match the basic shape of the blade. 

Subdivide the edge to form the “handle”.

Now all of those edges seem a little messy. Delete the edges and use the [F]-Key to create new, simpler faces between the vertices.

Extrude it to give it some depth.

For some reason, Blender will shade it smooth when it’s extruded, so choose “Shade Flat”.

Now, we are going to start forming out the basic shape of he blade. If you are wondering why it looks so chunky, it’s because when you are modeling complex, smooth shapes like trees, cars, leaves, fish, even spoons, etc. it’s a good idea to make a simple blocky starting shape and add Subdivision Surface modifiers (subsurf) later.

To start with the sharp end, merge the vertices at the end. Make sure you do them just two-at-a-time.

To make the edge and airfoil, Move the vertices at the back closer to each other, and the vertices at the bottom together and a little to the side. Think about a curve on an airplane wing.

We have the basic shape now. Select the whole thing in edit mode and give it three simple subdivision cuts. This prevents the Subsurf modifier that we are going to give later from turning the blade into an ellipsoid blob.

Give it a Subsurf modifier with 2 subdivisions, but don’t apply yet. If it seems too blobby, then go into edit mode and exaggerate the positions of a few vertices. Note how in Edit mode, the simple block shape it still there, pulling on the new shape.

The blade will get shorter, so scale it again to match the reference photo.

Go into edit mode and move the entire mesh so it’s pivot point is at the very end. This will make it a lot easier to position the other two blades.

Move it so that the pivot point is exactly on the Y axis and right on the center of the cap in the reference photo.

Duplicate the blade 2 times. We want our blades to be exactly even with thirds, so we are going to rotate them mathematically. Rotate the second blade by 120 degrees- 1/3 of a circle. Rotate the third by 240 degrees. Join the three blades. We now have a perfectly even windmill. At this point, the reference image is no longer needed, so you can get rid of it.

Add a UV sphere to make the hubcap. If you look at other reference photos of windmills, you’ll notice that the hubcap is a half-ellipsoid. Scale it into that shape and rotate it by 90 degrees.

Delete half of it in edit mode.

Give it a Subsurf Modifier and shade it smooth.

You can move the hubcap and pole back so they’ll be in their right positions. We are now ready to make the last part, the generator. These things come in all shapes(but usually similar sizes), so I’m going with a simple Pentagonal Prism. Pentagonal, Hexagonal, etc. Prisms are easy to generate with the Cylinder generator. Add a cylinder and set the number of vertices to 5. Make sure you don’t click anything in the 3D viewport as even Blender 2.58 has an annoying trait where the options will disappear forever if you click anything else.

Go into Front-Orthographic view and click “align to view” which will automatically rotate it so it’s flat to the ground and perpendicular to the blades.

Move it up to the correct position and scale it so its radius is slightly bigger than the Hubcap.

Give it a Bevel Modifier to get rid of those sharp edges.

Join the Major Parts of the windmill. Join the Blades and Hubcap, and the Generator and Pole. Make sure you keep the Blades-Hubcap object separate, and to apply all modifiers before joining. When joining the Blades-Hubcap object, select the hubcap last so the pivot point is exactly on the center. This makes the blades animatable.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a gray windmill before. Give it a new material. Turn it all the way up to a pure white, and turn the Diffuse intensity to 1. In real life, windmills are quite dull and matte, but I like to give it some hard Specularity and just a little bit of mirror.

Give it a blue background, and your render should look like this.

However, that there is quite boring. We have to give it a nice scene, so I’m going to add some grass. I’m not going to teach you how to make the grass- there are tons of Blender grass tutorials floating around on the web.

I’m just duplicating the windmill a few times to make a wind farm.

Activate Environment Lighting to mimic the sky.

Let’s give that a render, and right of the bat, You’ll notice that the grass looks like someone took fifty spotlights and shined them on the Teletubbies’ bomb shelter meadow.

Much Better.

 Download the Finished .Blend