This is a companion video to a tutorial I made originally for Autodesk 3dsMax in which I created a Dupin Cyclide. Unfortunately, there is no parametric primitive with a 1 to 1 translation of the same tools or modifiers in Blender to match exactly with the 3dsmax object. Instead, I will attempt to use an alternate strategy for this time using modifiers and standard modeling techniques in Blender 2.8. I'm sure there are many other techniques which could be used in Blender to create this model, but this is the strategy I chose to employ.

Thanks for sharing this LuxXeon always enjoyed your tutorials

Cool - thanks for sharing

Ohhhh you know, with the right "material(s)" that would make a nice shoulder purse for my female characters.

Miss B posted at 2:04PM Wed, 20 February 2019 - #4346667

Ohhhh you know, with the right "material(s)" that would make a nice shoulder purse for my female characters.

That's an interesting thought. I never considered it to be used that way, but I suppose that could work! I always figured earrings or jewelry of some kind would be the most practical use for this type of shape. An easy alternative to the technique above, if you're comfortable with using splines, is to create a spline extrusion based on a circle. This would give you a simple torus. From there, you could use another bezier spline to control the thickness of the torus in the same manner of a Dupin Cyclide shape. It's a little bit more complex than just bending and mirroring a cone shape, but it will provide you with a little more control.

If you want to create the twisted topoogy like the shape I made in the original 3dsmax tutorial, you could use a few modifier tricks to change the topology into spirals, because twisting the mirrored object with a simple twist modifier will not give the correct results.

Ohhhh, I hadn't thought about jewelry Lux, but now that you mention it, that shape would make a very nice pair or earrings.

Miss B posted at 5:38PM Wed, 20 February 2019 - #4346703

Ohhhh, I hadn't thought about jewelry Lux, but now that you mention it, that shape would make a very nice pair or earrings.

Thanks, Miss B. Actually, I almost forgot, I already made a pair of earrings from this shape and have it for free in my downloads area here on Renderosity. You can find the OBJ version here:

Cyclide Ritual Earrings

Hope you find some use for them. Also, I have a couple other earrings as freebies in my free section. I think a pair of Black Cat earrings, etc. There should be a OBJ version which will open with proper placement and scale into Daz Studio. I don't own Poser, so I don't know if they will import properly there. You will just need to add materials or maps to them.

Ohhhh thanks Lux. I was thinking more of a curved wire that went through the ear and attached to the sides of the Dupin Cyclide (rather than the top arch of the Dupin Cyclide), but attaching the whole thing "as is" to hook earrings works as well. I'll check out the others too while I'm at it.

Miss B posted at 7:16PM Wed, 20 February 2019 - #4346716

Ohhhh thanks Lux. I was thinking more of a curved wire that went through the ear and attached to the sides of the Dupin Cyclide (rather than the top arch of the Dupin Cyclide), but attaching the whole thing "as is" to hook earrings works as well. I'll check out the others too while I'm at it.

Thank you. I'm just glad it has given you some inspiration. I'd be thrilled if you created something from it on your own. I was hesitant to make this tutorial to begin with, because I felt that the shape was rather rudimentary, but I realized that it's not as simple as it looks. When I showed the freebie model to some people no one asked how it was made because everyone just assumes you could take a standard torus and just squeeze the top part. In fact, you "could" do that with something like soft selection or proportional editing tool in Blender, but it only works sufficiently with a rather high density of points and still there is further editing involved to get it to be an actual Dupin Cyclide shape. So when I thought about the different techniques to approach this model, I felt like a tutorial would be worth it after all. There's really only a few ways you could do this, and this particular method isn't an obvious one, so I decided to show it.

Thanks again! Have fun.

UPDATE: Here is an entirely new method for modeling the Dupin Cyclide in Blender. I happened to be experimenting with the Extra Objects and found a XYZ Math Function preset which actually DOES mimic the exact same techniques found in the 3dsmax version of this tutorial after all! I was so thrilled to know this exsisted, and it was in a location I had previously looked through before, but somehow missed this preset. In this new tutorial, I'll also show you how to get the ridges on the model in the same fashion I did for the 3dsmax original.

Ohhhh, even more interesting. Unfortunately I'm going to have to wait, because I don't have 2.8 as yet, and my 2.78 and 2.79b don't allow me to use the Simple Deform Bend on the X axis. The other 3 options do, but not the Bend, so that must be something that was added with 2.8.

The newest tutorial won't require using the deformers at all. You'll be able to get the Cyclide shape with just a few clicks as along as you have the Extra Objects addon enabled. Good luck

Ohhh, good to know, and yes, I have the Extra Objects addon enabled. I'll definitely try that one out for sure.

I need a new laptop in any case, and version 2.8 needs a newer version of the OpenGL, than I can get for this old puppy, so another reason I have to wait to download and install 2.8 to try out the first tutorial.

Well Lux, I was able to do the new "revisited" version of the tutorial, though I made the extrude a little too much, so will have to do it again before I'm satisfied with the results. That said, however, the tutorial was nice and easy to follow.

OK, redid it, and here's the result. I got a little carried away with colors, as I wanted to see if I could get the extrudes to stand out even more by making them a different color than the base, oh and I resized it down quite a bit as it was huuuuuge.

Miss B! That looks so good! Great job! Especially like how you gave the extrusions a different material ID, which I did in the 3dsmax tutorial but forgot to do in the Blender tutorials. Fantastic!! Since the object is a solid and watertight, if you scale it in real world units it could also be 3d printed.

Glad you like it Lux! I'm sure I'll be playing with it more, since that was rendered with Blender Render engine, and I do want to try rendering it with Cycles, and I "do" want to try and make a pair of earrings out of it.

As far as 3D printing I, unfortunately, can't afford a 3D printer, but it's certainly something others, who do have one, can/should think about trying.

Thanks again, Miss B. Oh, I don't own a 3d printer either but I have a store on Shapeways and when you own a store there, they give a good discount if you want to get your own designs printed, which I have. The printer tech they use is called SLS, which is far more detailed than any home printer could be and doesn't require building "supports" for the models. You could get something printed in steel, glass, even raw silver. Amazing stuff.

Ahhhh, definitely interesting. I only thought about it as a number of folks taking the Blender class I'm taking at Udemy, as well as a Unity and a Unreal gaming classes, have posted pictures of items they modeled in Blender, and then ran through their 3D printers. Looks like fun, but I'm not sure what I would do with anything I did have 3D printed.

Miss B posted at 7:06PM Tue, 26 February 2019 - #4347025

Ahhhh, definitely interesting. I only thought about it as a number of folks taking the Blender class I'm taking at Udemy, as well as a Unity and a Unreal gaming classes, have posted pictures of items they modeled in Blender, and then ran through their 3D printers. Looks like fun, but I'm not sure what I would do with anything I did have 3D printed.

Oh I didn't know you were taking classes. Udemy is an excellent resource, good luck with it! Yes, 3d printing can be very useful for a number of things in 3d, and growing in popularity for custom jewelry design. I sell rings, pendants, earrings, etc. on my Shapeways which can be shipped directly to the client as a physical object anywhere in the world. It can be used as previsualization for a traditional jeweler to create molds, or you can have stuff printed in 14k gold, stainless steel, or polished silver as a finished product. All depends on what your goals are for 3d modeling. It's not really useful to game designers, for example, unless you wanted to create tangible replicas of the game characters or objects to sell.

Actually, I've been using Blender since version 2.45, or maybe it was 2.47, but there are some things I've tried in other software but never tried in Blender. In fact, Lobo's the one who told me about this particular Blender class, which is currently updating all the projects for version 2.8. I've tried Spin modeling in a trial version of Rhino 3D years ago, and liked it. I also tried sculpting in Sculptris, but didn't like it, so since both these types of projects are in the class curriculum, I decided to take it so I can learn some new goodies. I'm also taking a Maya class, which so far has been fun as well. The other classes I'm signed up for aren't 3D related.

LuxXeon posted at 8:52PM Tue, 26 February 2019 - #4347042

Miss B posted at 7:06PM Tue, 26 February 2019 - #4347025

Ahhhh, definitely interesting. I only thought about it as a number of folks taking the Blender class I'm taking at Udemy, as well as a Unity and a Unreal gaming classes, have posted pictures of items they modeled in Blender, and then ran through their 3D printers. Looks like fun, but I'm not sure what I would do with anything I did have 3D printed.

Oh I didn't know you were taking classes. Udemy is an excellent resource, good luck with it! Yes, 3d printing can be very useful for a number of things in 3d, and growing in popularity for custom jewelry design. I sell rings, pendants, earrings, etc. on my Shapeways which can be shipped directly to the client as a physical object anywhere in the world. It can be used as previsualization for a traditional jeweler to create molds, or you can have stuff printed in 14k gold, stainless steel, or polished silver as a finished product. All depends on what your goals are for 3d modeling. It's not really useful to game designers, for example, unless you wanted to create tangible replicas of the game characters or objects to sell.

Ohhhh, a jewelery designer using it for pre-visualization is a great idea. A lot of folks work in 3D software to help with their real work, even in the medical field, so I can see what you've mentioned being an asset for sure.

OK Lux, here's a render in Cycles, though I had to play with the shader set up because the extrudes in black kept looking very dull, and not shiny like the red base and insets. Soooo, I played with increasing the Metallic setting, and settled on 25, but it still didn't look as I wanted, so I set Anisotropic to 1.0, and now, at least, it seems to work. The only thing I did realize is, you can't really use solid black, as it really looked flat, so I set it to a very close to solid black color, and even though they're not as shiny as the red areas, at least you can see them. I suppose better lighting might help as well.

I think this one's going up in my gallery.

Yes, I just uploaded it to my gallery, Lux, and I gave you full credit for it, pointing folks here to the Blender forum if they want to try it out themselves.

That's great, Miss B! You did a fantastic job on the model there, and I like the way the extrusions look in the end. The contrast of black and red really gives it an almost surreal appearance, kind of like the optical illusion graphics you see around on Pinterest or Instagram. If you animated a rotation, I bet it woud make an interesting Instagram animation! Nicely done.

I'm not into animation, but that would definitely make a very interesting one for sure.

Thanks for sharing the tutorial, really enjoyed the video. Gonna check your other tutorials and guidance, thx)

AnnWanges posted at 10:53PM Mon, 04 March 2019 - #4347369

Thanks for sharing the tutorial, really enjoyed the video. Gonna check your other tutorials and guidance, thx)

Thank you, Ann. Let me know how you make out, or if you have any questions. I have new tutorials on the way soon. Enjoy.

Ohhh, I look forward to seeing what you come up with.