Next Dimension: Pinwheels

On a pleasant Sunday evening, we head not to the amusements but to the adjacent seaside, abundant with cheap and cheerful souvenir shops and stalls. Well, my eyes just lit up; what have we here?

The pinwheel was a pretty seductive toy to my infant self. They had all the pull of my beloved windmills, except these whirling wonders were resplendent in sweet, sparkling colour and could be held in the hand. And they span uncontrollably with even the slightest breeze.

They’re much simpler in structure than a windmill, of course, but boy, that didn’t translate into the modeling process. I thought the Bend tool would produce a fold easily – it didn’t. Coming out of Cinema 4D, I couldn’t even find a tutorial for assistance, which leads me to believe there’s a blindingly simple way of achieving this… I must have missed it!

I cut a square into triangles, isolated one, then broke that into several vertical sectors. I then took each of those sectors and lifted or rotated as needed to give the impression of a fold. That sounds elementary enough, but it took forever, and almost cost me (what’s left of) my hair. Still! We got there in the end.

I used Hyper NURBS on the polygon to soften the edges, which gave it more a ‘folded paper’ feel. Turning this up even more rounded the edges to almost a completely different style, so I took this and indeed created a separate toy, this time with eight fins:

Oh to be beside the seaside! Now, who’s for skinny-dipping?

• 3d
• Art
• beach
• cinema 4d
• model
• pinwheel
• seaside
• toy
• windmill