snail shell

Michael Knubben

i'm trying to model a snailshell, but i have no idea what's the best way to go about it.
the polycount really doesn't matter much, since it wont be for any games, i'm just fooling around with things i hope to one day animate.

MoP

There's probably some sneaky way you could do it with a segmented Plane, apply a Taper and Bend modifier (or just a Twist modifier, probably) to get the spiral shape, then Collapse verts near each other, to merge it all down to a single EPoly object which you can then manually edit (that's if you're using Max - otherwise I dunno)...

I'd probably just hand-model it after looking at some reference. :P

Noren

Well, seems like I must be pretty bored...
Anyway, here is my attempt, pretty similar to MoPs idea:
(Using 3dsmax, also )



Use Skew and Bend on a box in order to get something similar to the leftmost object. Delete all but the front faces ,(Could propably have used a plane all along ), and weld vertices. Fill up the centre and chamfer the spiral-edgeloop. Bevel the now divided spiraling facering.
Use a cylindrical FDD in order to scale down the centre and give it some Volume. Now you have a good base to work from.:)
This is of course just one way to do it. I tried to use a helix first, but it's vertice distribution just sucks and normalize spline didn't seem to help much either.

Wells

there's a free program, Spiralizer, that creates shapes like this. Its a fairly simple way to get spirals and curls.

hawken

I used to use a program many years back called "real 3d" on the amiga. Anyway, it had this neat macro function, so all I had to do was make one segment - record macro - then playback the macro a set number of times... hey presto! snail shell.

Now this was about 10 years ago, so 3ds max MUST have something similar.

Michael Knubben

Thanks for the help guys, i'll see how much of it i can use in wings (i know, i should've said! oops), but i'm sure it'll certainly be helpfull upto a certain level.

Rhinokey

oh wings,, not sure you may have to wing it.. haha.. wing it.. all the ways i would make one in max would use things that i doubt wings had,, i made one last nite by taking a cylinder and just hape merging a helix into it,

Michael Knubben

I do have max installed though, i just never used it. If i unexpectedly find myself with some time and courage on my hands, i'll definately give max a go... i'll need an application that can handle animation soon anyway.