Modeling a hammer in Blender

Assalamualaikum. My name is Widhi Muttaqien from Expose Academy.

In this short tutorial video we’re going to model a hammer using Blender. Before moving on I need to warn you guys, that this tutorial is not for complete beginners, so you still need to understand the basic of Blender such as navigation and simple modeling techniques. Okay so let’s just get to it. When you first open Blender you will see a cube like this. We’re going to use this cube as the starting object.

Before we do anything I want to remove this camera and this light object as it will get in the way. So select all of them and hit x, and choose delete. Next we have the grid down here. We’re going to see the model from the bottom so having to see the grid will certainly interfere with our modeling process. To turn off the grid you can press N while your mouse is in this 3d view area. Scroll down here until you find the display section. Turn off the grid floor here. If you want, you can also hide the axis in here. But I will leave this on so I know which way is y and which way is x. Press N again to hide the 3d-view-properties panel. O yes, the last thing we need to set up. I don’t need to see the timeline window down here. So we might as well collapse it for now.

Select the cube by right clicking on it. Now go to edit mode. You can click in here and choose edit mode. Or simply press Tab in the keyboard, to enter the edit mode. Okay. In edit mode we can access sub objects such as vertices, edges and faces. In other software faces are usually called polygons. But in Blender we simply called it faces.

Remember when modeling any object in Blender, you always want the object to face the minus y axis as this is the default front side in Blender. So this way is the back side and this way is the front side. Make sure you are in the face mode. You can see the the face icon is active down here. Select the face in front. Press E to extrude and just drag like this. I don’t use any exact measurement for this so just use approximation. Press I for inset. Roughly about this size. Move this to front a bit. Press E again to extrude. About this long. E again to extrude. Then Press S to scale. This area will be the head of the hammer. Press E again to extrude. Scale this a bit. And adjust it again as you please. Okay. For the end of the hammer head we need to double or even triple the amount of edges in this area. Why? Because we’re going to add subdivision modifier later to smooth out the model. And if you guys already familiar with how subdivision works. The more edges exist at a corner region the sharper that corner will be when subdivision applied to it. To add more edges at this corner we can do several methods. But for now let’s just do inset twice. Okay so now we have something like this.

Okay now let’s get back to the main body of the hammer. We want to create the hammer’s claws in this side. So pick this face. Extrude this a little. For now I think the body is a bit to small . Let’s make this longer a bit. To select multiple vertices you can hold Ctrl and use the left mouse button to click and drag like this. But notice by doing so only vertices at the front part are selected. Any vertices that we don’t see won’t get selected. So this is one of the blender UI philosophy. And that is: “Anything that can not be seen can not be selected”. So to overcome this, we can do one of the followings. First we can click this button down here that says “limit selection to visible”. By clicking this button we can now see the object as semitransparent surface. So we can select vertices that we can not see before. Or. Let me uncheck this button first. The second method which is quicker in my opinion. Is to switch to wireframe mode. You can press Z for shortcut to enter the wireframe mode. Or click in this pull-down option down here and choose wireframe. But pressing Z is much more preferable as it is way faster to do it. To go back to solid mode again simply press Z again. Okay. So it’s kind of a toggle button okay. Now in wireframe mode we can select all of these vertices easily as we can see them clearly. Move them to the back. And just make any adjustment as you see fit. There is no right or wrong about this process. Really it depends on your personal preference.

Okay now that we have the body shape fixed. Let’s pick this edge and move it up a bit. Then We want to have 2 claws right. Two divide this face, press Ctrl+R, left click to do the cut and right click to cancel the sliding. Okay now we want to extrude these 2 faces. You might be tempted to select both of these faces and press E to do extrusion. But that will result a unified face. What we really need is these two faces extruding together but independently. The way to do this is by first select them both. Then instead of pressing E shortcut. press Alt+E. This will bring up the extrude option. This region is actually the default extrude behavior. What we really want to use is this one. The “extrude individual faces”. If somehow you don’t like using the the Alt+E shortcut. You can also go to the tool shelf at the left. And notice we have this button called “extrude individual”. This is basically the same thing. Okay. So click on it. And just move this away until approximately at this position. Okay before moving on. This what makes extrude individual different from the ordinary region extrusion. If I select this face and move it like so. You can see they are independent to one another. Im sure you get the idea. I’ll undo this first.

Okay, after having something like this. Press S to scale it down a bit. Press S and then Z to scale it down on the Z axis. Okay now I want to scale but the scale should happen on each face not on both of them together. Can we do this? O yes we can. First you see this button here that looks like overlapping spheres. If you click on it we can see so many options. This is the pivot point option. Now if you came from 3ds max background the word pivot point is a bit different from what we have in Blender. In blender pivot point simply means the center of the transformation. And it works with multiple objects selection. Notice by default it is set to median. It means whatever transformation happens to the selection will always use the center position of all of them as the center of the transformation. Okay. Now change the pivot point option to “individual origins”. And now watch when I press S to scale and scale these two faces. They scale independently using their own center position as the pivot point. Okay. Now just do some adjustment as you wish, until you see what you like.

Next we want to bend these claws so we need more segments along this way. Ctrl+R again, now scroll the mouse until we have 3 edge loops. Do this also with the other claw. Now go to side view by pressing 3 on the numpad. Press Z to enter the wireframe mode. Select all of these vertices at the claws. Press R and rotate it. Press g to move it. Now hold ctrl and press minus in the numpad to shrink the selection. And just repeat the process. Rotate them. Grab them with G. Until we like what we see.

Okay so now we have this hammer head and the claws. Go to modifier panel at the properties window. Then let’s add the subdivision modifier. Turn the viewport to 2 also just like the render value. Notice how this hammer looks too round. Especially the clays. They look more like an octopus tentacles. We need to add more edge loops this way so the corners are more defined. So Ctrl+R again and just click, and right click to cancel the sliding. You can go and add more edges if you want to sharpen the corners more, but I think this is enough for me. Let’s just move on to modeling the handle.

Go to face selection mode. Select these 2 faces up here. Press I for inset. Inset it just a little bit. Then inset again. We need to double the inset in here so we have double edge loop in the corner, to make the corner sharper when subdivided by the subdivision modifier. Extrude it. Scale it. And do inset again twice so the top area will be sharper also.

For the bottom handle. Just do the same thing. Inset twice. Extrude. Make is smaller by scaling it. Extrude again. Make it a bit bigger. Extrude again and make it smaller. Do inset twice down here to make the corner sharper in this area. Lastly go to side view. In wireframe mode, just tweak the shape again so we have better proportion.

Okay, I think our hammer model is finished. We can go back to object mode and switch to smooth shading to see the final result. Sure we can adjust more here in there to make it better but I guess this is good enough already for our tutorial. Thank you for watching. Don’t forget to subscribe. Wassaalamualaikum.