Adding smooth shading to the model

You probably noticed that the model has a faceted look to it. Most of the polygons catch the light and pop out. Polygons can either have "smooth shading" or "flat shading." Can you guess which one most of our polygons have right now? That's right, flat shading.

Flat shading is great for hard edges, but not so great for smooth surfaces. Luckily, we can do a bit of both.

First, we are going to apply smooth shading to all of the objects as a base:

1. Press the A hotkey to select all the objects.
2. Go to the Object menu at the top of the 3D View.
3. Choose the Shade Smooth option:

The faceted look is gone, but now the time machine looks like a big nasty blob – yuck! As it turns out, some flat shading is a good thing, particularly around hard corners. Luckily, Blender gives us a way to adjust our shading automatically, based on the angle of the edges:

1. Select the Base object and go to the green Object Data Properties tab in the Properties panel.
2. Open the Normals section.
3. Check the box that says Auto Smooth.

4. Adjust the angle until only the edges we want have flat shading (45 works well for the base):

That's looking better already. Now, we just need to do the same thing for all the other pieces. You'll have to set each Angle number individually since each object has different angles. When you're finished, you'll have a much better-looking time machine, similar to the one shown in the following screenshot:

And there we have it! There are more precise ways to mark specific edges as sharp, but that's a bit overkill for this project. Since it's looking so good, we've got to check it out from another angle:

Oh yeah, that's the stuff. If I were you, I would totally time travel all around town in that thing! Give yourself a round of applause – we're done!