Hammer is the new tool that was added to 3DTin yesterday.
So far you could compose a 3D object by placing cubes on top of each other. Now with the hammer tool you can break those cubes into smaller ones. You can then delete or re-color some of those subcubes. This lets you add details to your sketch that are finer than a cube size.
For instance, check out following two screenshots of the Batman model – one that uses hammer tool and other that doesn’t.
You can see the Bat logo in finer details in the sketch with the hammer tool.
When you select a hammer tool and click on a cube, it gets subdivided into 8 subcubes. If you were to apply the hammer tool again on one of these subcubes, it will get subdivided further into 8 subcubes. You can repeat this process up to 5 levels deep. That means, potentially you can divide a regular cube into 2^15 identical subcubes. That equals 32768 tiny subcubes. So potentially you can control the smoothness of your sketch at that tiny a level.
The hammer tool however only works with WebGL enabled browsers. I spent a long time to make it work on top of Canvas 2D, but the algorithms got too complicated and slow at some point, so I decided to disable it altogether with Canvas 2D backend. However, this limitation works seamlessly. For example, You can see the above batman HD model here. If you open this link using a WebGL enabled browser, you will see the high resolution version. But if you don’t have WebGL, the sketch will be loaded automatically at low resolution (showing only the regular size cubes). However, you cannot modify a sketch that has high resolution details with Canvas 2D.
This is the big feature I talked about couple posts back. It has taken several rewrites and about a month to get it working. It will further need improvements from usability point of view, I will be working on them soon. Any comments you might have to improve this tool are very welcome.
P.S. Also added a “Save As” option yesterday.
3DTin 