Flutes, flutes, and more flutes

[davidheim1]

I have been working on a model of a 19th century French cylinder desk for several days now. The piece is full of flutes--on the legs, on corner blocks, and on a big fat curved molding on the sides. The corner blocks were easiest. I extruded a cylinder with rounded ends, then copied and intersected the cylinders with the blocks. I did something similar for the legs, making a tapered cylinder that I copy/rotated and intersected. (Here, I borrowed a technique that I learned from Dave Richards: I cut a pie-shaped wedge from the leg, did one intersection with the flute shape, then copy/rotated the wedge to re-make the leg.) For that big, fat curved molding, I turned on hidden geometry and traced a path along the molding. I used the Pipe Along Path plug-in to generate the flute shape, then intersected it with the molding and did a lot of erasing.

I still have to do the top of the desk, the interior gallery, and the hardware.

Thanks for putting up with a long-winded posting.
Best
dh

[cotty]

Very nice, I'm looking forward to the finished desk!

[davidheim1]

Thank you, cotty. I'm looking forward to finishing this, too. It's been a chore.
Best,
dh

[Dave R]

David, that looks excellent! I was eyeing up a piece recently that is heavily fluted. Then I decided I'd better keep my nose to the grindstone and do the work I'm supposed to do.

[davidheim1]

Thank you, Dave.
Now get back to work!

[davidheim1]

Finished.
I tried wood-grain textures, but nothing looked right on the curved surfaces. So I went back to plain colors.

[cotty]

[davidheim1]

Thank you, cotty. Glad you like the model.
Best,
dh

[ntxdave]

Looks really nice. Your hard works shows in the detail

A project like this would make a great tutorial for those of us who would like to improve our skills.

[davidheim1]

Thanks, ntxdave.
Let me see what I can do about a tutorial. Probably a piece of video. It'll take me a couple of weeks to get around to it, though.
Best,
dh