I have been struggling with this thing for hours. I have a couple of clues and haven't done too badly but I'm finding inherent problems, not all of which are simple program restrictions. I've been trying to make this berry pot. This is the best I've been able to do so far but it has some things I'm not crazy about. It's made of torus' for the main body and booleaned ovals and cubes for the cups. I don't care for the sort of wood graining that's happening for one thing, and the squaring effect where I change the torus sizes to start a new curve. The wood graining seems to be an effect of the torus because it's there no matter what material I apply. The squaring I don't understand at all. It's happening where I change from one increase or decrease of the torus size in multi-replicating. The changes are .25 or .5 in size. My main problem with this version is that it taxes my system more than I'd like. The scene I'm working on is going to have lots and lots of objects so I'd like to save every little bit that I can. So, the next version, which isn't even worth posting a picture of, I did with ovals and spheres. I saw something once about making an hourglass (I think) and where the top and bottom joined, they used a negative torus to smooth the seam and make a nice curve. Uh, yeah, right. All I get is a square place where the torus meets the two pieces. I've found an object in some free downloads but it's in poser format and I can't use it. So, my questions are.... Does anyone have any hints on how to go about making a nice smooth curve that doesn't take many pieces (I think this one has about 800 torus' in it) OR, since I've found the one object, some program that will convert one 3D program file to another type? Thanks for any help. I really appreciate it! Susan

I think you can simplify A LOT the model, 800 tori are too much, with 8-10 of them you can achieve the same effect. Try to do a positive cylinder and use the tori as negative to carve the pot.

Yep 800 tori seems overkill. Several ways to achieve this with bryce. I did the above with a bryce egg, cone, 8 tori, two boolean cubes. I didnt tweak it to match your picture but it's pretty close.

Thanks for the suggestions and the picture. They give me a bit more of an idea how to do this. And I agree...800-ish tori is a bit much but it was what I got to give the closest effect I wanted. But, back to the drawing board! :o)

Eeelie, your object can be done with only 30 objects, most of them the duplicate spheres-and-cutouts for the "cup" parts... I don't know how you got 800 toruses in there! It's amazing, but I hope you finish this one without any more headaches.

LOL! It sounds like the pot was made by the same method that potters use. Substituting tori for where the rings of clay would be layered at the potters wheel. Heheheh...
It doesn't need to be that involved. Just think of the simple geometry and work from there.

Well maybe sleeping on it helped. 'Course getting past just *having* to have a curved neck helped! :o) And, the best part is I'm down to 45 pieces total. Still not what I was envisioning but it'll do until I can get something better.

Looks great.

You might also experiment with using a symmetrical lattice set to "solid when boolean rendering" and then stretch and boolean it to get the exact shape you want. Metaballs also might be an alternative