Making of: Modeling a Revolver

by Jonathan Williamson

Advanced Jonathan Williamson Modeling Models Resources Tutorials Written Tutorial

Hello and welcome to this walk-through style tutorial on modeling a revolver in Blender 2.5. This tutorial is formatted slightly different than our normal written tutorials; it is not presented as a step-by-step tutorial, rather it is meant to give you a solid glimpse into the process involved with modeling a complete, complex model such as the revolver seen here. If you are looking for an advanced, step-by-step tutorial, then I recommend you check out our Modeling an M4 Rifle Exclusive tutorial series. The final model I will be creating can be seen above. Modeling time was approximately 4-5 hours and it was rendered in Cycles. When modeling a hard-surface object such as a revolver, I always like to start by blocking in many of the components before getting to the detail modeling. I will begin by working with the barrel and the body of the gun. To get started I will add an open

cylinder for the barrel and then also add a cube for the body, scaling it down along the Y-axis to fit the approximate width.

I can then block in the gun cylinder with another tube, extrude the body shape from the cube, and duplicate down the barrel to create the extractor rod housing.

The next step is to focus on the barrel a bit more by merging the two cylinders that make up the barrel and the extractor rod housing.

After doing this I can model the top of the barrel, where the front sight attaches by extruding up the top of the barrel.

Now that the top block is extruded, I can add a few loops along its length so as to cut a couple holes in it.

I will go ahead and leave the barrel where it is now and move my focus temporarily to the grip. I will model the grip by first extruding the grip support from the body and then adding a new mesh for the grip. The grip is very easy to create by just extruding the shape from a cube and adding a few edgeloops to smooth it out.

At this point I have all the main forms of the gun created. I can now start working on the major details. The first one I will create is the trigger guard, by extruding from the body mesh.

The next few steps are to make the piece that holds the cylinder. It acts as a hinge, letting the cylinder flip out for reloading. In order to do this I will extrude the shape from the body to wrap around the barrel and the extractor rod housing.

I can then create the actual hinge piece and the area surrounding it.

Now that the cylinder hinge is mostly finished I will go ahead and add a Subdivision Surface modifier to begin polishing the mesh as I go. As soon as I add the modifier the model will become smoothed and thus look lumpy. In order to sharpen the edges of the mesh I will go on and add multiple edgeloops around the perimeter of each component.

My current mesh looks like this:

Moving on, I will continue working on the mesh piece by piece. The first of the remaining pieces is the rear sight. This is a relatively simple part to model; it can be done by just extruding a box bit by bit and then adding the perimeter edgeloops. The sight I have modeled, including the recess in the guns body can be seen below:

Next up is the slot for the hammer.

Then the small cut-out in the front of the body.

After this inset comes the disk at the back of the cylinder.

Now comes perhaps the most difficult part of the entire model, creating the actual cylinder. The cylinder is difficult because the topology is crucial to get clean, or else the surface will not appear smooth when were done. My first step to create the cylinder is

to replace the block mesh I added in the beginning with a new circle comprised of 48 vertices. The number of vertices is important as there must be enough to divide evenly between each of the grooves along its length while still providing enough vertices for the details. After adding in the circle I will add another six circles, distributed evenly around the inner perimeter of the original circle.

Next I can fill in the gaps between the circles and extrude in the inner section of the end of the cylinder.

With the inset created I can then duplicate that inner surface to extrude the insert. After a little more modeling I can also create the central notched piece.

Up next, I am ready to create the grooves along the length of the cylinder. This is most easily done by creating a elongated half-circle that matches the topology of the cylinder beneath it. After creating this circle mesh I an separate it to a new mesh and then use a Shrinkwrap modifier to project it onto the surface of the cylinder. Immediately after this I will apply the Shrinkwrap modifier and rejoin the meshes.

After rejoining the meshes I can simply extrude inner surface of the groove.

That leaves the grooves complete, ready to fill in the end of the cylinder.

Next, using the same technique as the grooves, I can create the T-shaped notches in the same way as the grooves.

The final cylinder looks like this:

All the hard parts of this project are now complete. I will now finish off each of the other details quickly. The first of which is the groove in the extractor rod housing, Figure 27. Followed by adding the actual extractor rod.

Moving on I will add the release switch for the cylinder and the screw heads on the right side of the gun.

Then I will add the raised surface to the the grip and the insetted coin.

The final addition to the model is the front sight.

With that the model is complete. The finished model can be seen below:

As I mentioned in the beginning, this project took approximately 4-5 hours to model. If you are interested in seeing a similar project to this, as a video tutorial, that takes the viewer through every single process involved, step-by-step then be sure to check out my member exclusive tutorial series on modeling an M4 Assault Rifle on http://blendercookie.com. The result of this tutorial series is shown below:

Thanks for reading!