Ok, these is my second tutorial, and I’m going to show you, how to make a pretty realistic pickaxe in Cinema 4D. The process is pretty straightforward. No complex modeling, nothing like that. Just using splines and NURBS. Ok, so let’s get started.

1. First you’ll need to find a pickaxe picture. I chose these one:

It’s pretty accurate, so it should do nicely.

2. Open up Cinema 4D.

3. Now go to Top view and press Shift+V or go to Edit/Configure under the view menu. You should see a menu appear under the “Attributes” tab in the bottom right corner. Now save the pickaxe image to your desktop and press the “…” button under the “Back” tab:

If you used my pictures set the image hight (Size X) to 330 px. The width (size Y) should adjust automatically. But make sure you have “Keep aspect ratio” selected!

4. Ok, now you have a background image, so you’ll be able to trace the wooden part of the pickaxe without too much trouble. If you know how to do that, skip to part 5, if not, read on.

Ok, to trace the object, you’ll need to use a spline. Select Objects/Spline object

Now select the “Move tool” and “Use point tool”.

To place a point hold Control and press the Left Mouse Button. Before you start placing any points, make sure you have the right type of Spline selected. You can change that by clicking on the spline in the “Objects” panel, and changing the type under the “Object” bar. I used Akma, but if you are more experienced, and want more control over the Spline use Bezier.

Make sure you only trace the left or right half of the object, like in the picture below. And now just trace the wooden part of the pickaxe.

5. To make the accusal object from the spline , create Lathe NURBS and put the spline under them. Make sure the NURBS are in the center of the “wooden” part!

Ok, so we got that covered. We are going to make the metal part in 3 objects instead of 1.

6. There are 2 easy ways to make the center part. The 1.st one is the same concept as we made the wooden part. Create a spline and trace the left or right half of the object. and then put the spline under Lathe NURBS.

The second way is to make 2 circle splines. To make a circle spline go to Object/Spline Primitive and select Circle. Position the first one at the bottom of the center metal part, and the second one at the top of it.

Now create Loft NURBS and put both circles under them.

7. So now that we got that covered, I’ll first explain how to make the left part, that is more rounded, and the right part, that is more “rectangle-ish”.

To make the left, more rounded part, we’re going to use Loft NURBS, Circles and Rectangles. If you look closely, you can see it crosses from a circle shape to a rectangle shape. In the picture below, you can see where approximately where to position the circles and “a” rectangle. (to make them go to Object/Spline Primitive)

Legend:
Red=Circle
Blue=Rectangle

Now just put all splines under Loft NURBS. WARNING: If you use more than 2 splines with Loft NURBS, you must put the splines under Loft NURBS in the correct order. In these case just put them under Loft NURBS as they follow from left to right (or from right to left).

8. Now to make the right half, we are going to use the samo method, only these time, we’re only going to use rectangles.

Tip: Adjust the width of each rectangle at every point, but leave the hight at around 20. I made the last rectangle 23, so it looks a little better.

Blue=Rectangle

9. Ok, so now we should have a nice cool-looking pickaxe. But we need to materialize it. I took the materials from Cinema 4D-s library, because they looked perfect. And modified them a little bit of course. You can download the 2 materials

That’s it. You can download the finished model HERE