Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Modelling Farm Tools

This tutorial will take you step by step through the process of modelling several different types of traditional farm tools.

Handle
I apologize for the lack of pictures, I will try to get to those later...so either try to follow along the best you can or please come back when this page is more complete.

This section is designed to create a good looking, generic tool handle that for economy of time you can easily reuse with little or no modification for each different farm tool.

Blender should start out with the default cube and the 3D cursor in the center. Delete the cube. Make sure you are in top view (NUM7) and add a cylinder (space + Add selection + Cylinder selection). A window should appear that says "Vertices: 16" (this determines how many individual sides the cylinder will have, typing "4" in the place of the 16 will create a cuboid, so you can determine the startout detail here), for the purposes of this tutorial a simpler mesh will suffice, so click OK.

You should be in EDIT MODE, hit the A key to deselect all vertices. Press NUM3 to go to SIDE VIEW and press Z to go to WIREFRAME VIEW. Select the top vertices, either using BOX SELECT (press B and click and drag the cursor to include the intended selection), or LASSO SELECT (hold down CTRL while clicking and dragging around the intended selection. You may LASSO DESELECT by holding CTRL plus SHIFT and then clicking and dragging what you you want to deselect).

With the top vertices selected, use the EXTRUDE tool (E) and select Region. A purple line should appear and you may notice that moving the curser up and down will move the extension. Hold down CTRL to confine the movement to even increments and move the curser up 2 units (you should see this between the buttons window and the mesh window).

Hold CTRL and scale the selection (S) to 90%(.9). Extrude again and move the selection up (along the Z or vertical dimension) 2 units. Press S and resize to 80%. Repeat the extrude/move, scaling to 90%. Extrude/move again, but do not scale this time.