Stanley Screwdriver
 

This took me about four hours to model out. I am going to try texturing it tomorrow with the logo and some rust on the metallic thing.
Also i'll post a wireframe first thing tomorrow.

This is hankering back to Mark's toolset thread I remember from a little while ago. Whilst the handle looks pretty good, I'm not convinced by the shape of the blade. Maybe this is me just thinking that all flat'ead screwdrivers should be more narrow at the end but the fall off going from the cylindrical shape to the flat end just doesn't look right to me for some reason.

Yea i have to move around some points for the narrow end.
Anyway here is the wireframe.

When I get back from the office tonight, I'll dig out a wireframe of the blade shape I ended up using - took me around four attempts before I managed to get a mesh I was happy with...


... actually, this reminds me that I never finished the tape measure I was working on either ... :(

I refined the the narrow part of the metallic part. It's more thinner than the previous one.

OK, here's a couple of images that show the way I eventually settled on getting the screwdriver blade to look pretty much like the original. The isometric wireframe shows the overall shape:

http://www.medwards.dsl.pipex.com/li.../Isometric.png

... and this second orthographic projection shows the critical part of the shape:

http://www.medwards.dsl.pipex.com/li...lBladeView.png

Basically, the blade is a simply disc, extruded out to form the shaft. This is then bevelled slightly with no inset to form the double-cut needed sharpen the transition to the blade.

Next, put a square in the background, centered on the shaft for reference, and make it slightly larger than the shaft itself, and take an even number of the points of the screwdriver shaft and stretch them in the X and Y axes, and drag them until they conform to the square.

Once this is done, drag the points (mainly) horizontally until they conform to the rough shape of your background reference image and perform a bandsaw around the upper part of this geometry to sharpen the curve. (this should give you the geometry shown in the second image above).

This done, simply extend all the points again, stretch them until they are all flat on the Z axis, and scale them down in the Y axis to form the taper on the blade. Finally, make the end of the blade by manually patching and bandsawing to fill up the area with quads (you may also want to add a knife along the edge to sharpen it up.

Finally, hit tab to subpatch.

BTW - I eventually ended up actually scanning the screwdriver at around 400 DPI to get a reference I could really zoom in on to get the shape right.

Hey Mark if it's not a bother to you can you post your 400 DPI image of the screwdriver?

The reason why its not coming out as i planned is because of the detail that i'm trying to put in on the tip. Seems like that is jacking up the whole thing.

Maybe i'll just try UVMapping the detail on. I'll give it a try.
Thanx for the small tute :)

Well, I've only posted the 400 DPI images of the blade rather than the whole screwdriver since those are far too large to stick up here (Hell, these little images weigh in at 1/2 Meg already. :)

In order to see the shape detail of the blade, you may have to increase your monitor brightness somewhat. As for the actual texturing detail, I'd settle for mainly doing this through specularity andbump over a standard chrome finish. You can kind of achieve the texture via a slight turbulence elongated along the blade for the microbumps, and possibly a striped texture map in them around the shaft for the actual machining detail, although I'll admit that the one I modelled only had a chrome texture slapped on there and looked OK.

I've also got a TIF of the text at a high resolution that I can also post for you.

The text...

Thanx dude :) I'll find some time after work to get the stuff redone.