New Thing: Wind Demon for Gloomhaven, Part 1

I made a Wind Demon model for Gloomhaven!  I used some cool techniques that I want to share to make two parts of this model: the whirlwind and the hand/arm.  Today, I'm going to write about the whirlwind.

I made the whirlwind by using a combination of the Screw modifier (like I did on the Harrower Infester's legs) and the Curve modifier (like I did on the Giant Viper model).  I started out with a very simple piece of geometry - just one protruding bit of the whirlwind.  And before you ask, yes, this is probably the lamest screenshot that I've ever taken.

That's it, 3 vertices and 2 edges.  I then applied the Screw modifier and let it do its magic.  Since I didn't have the advantage of an Array modifier to make extra loops like I did while making the snake, I just made a really long series of twisting potential whirlwind.  I figured that I could cut it off at the bottom and top after it was all in place via a Boolean Difference modifier, so there'd be no harm in making it too long.  There was no science involved in getting the right values for the Angle or the Screw or the Iterations settings.  I just played around with it until I got a nice and long smooth looking twisting shaft without obvious gaps between the layers.  I tried turning on the Merge option, with a perhaps-gratuitous 1 unit merge threshold, but it didn't work for me and I had to remove duplicate vertices later to put it all together anyway.

So, I made a great big long spiral, longer than I thought that I was going to need, then I applied the Screw modifier so that I'd have some actual geometry to work with.  I then went into Edit mode, pressed a to select everything, and selected Remove Doubles from the toolshelf.  I gave it a less ludicrous (but still aggressive) threshold of 0.1 units, and then dragged around a few of the vertices between the loops to make certain that everything was joined together correctly.  Everything looked good, so I was ready to move on.

At this point, my big screw pillar didn't have a top or a bottom - I don't think that really matters since they're gonna get lopped off anyway, but it's easy to fix when you don't care how they look.  Alt-Right Click on an edge around the top or bottom, then press f to make it a face.  Ctrl-T will triangulate it, but it's not gonna be pretty.  It is going to be deleted by a boolean function though, so it really doesn't matter.

My next step was to make the screw more interesting.  My cartoonish understanding of a whirlwind tells me that they should be wider at the top than they are at the bottom, so I used the same trick as I did to taper the Giant Viper's body.  I turned on proportional edit, selected the top, the scaled it up.  I did a few scaling passes, once scaling on all axis (which made the coils near the bottom grow tighter) and once scaling on not the Z axis.  In the end, I came up with a spiral that I thought looked good, albeit boring.  I also decided that it was time to figure out how tall this thing was going to be, so I put a couple of blocks at the top and bottom of my desired height, so that they could be used for boolean functions to lop off extra material.

A whirlwind that goes straight up and down seems awfully boring to me, so I decided to use the Curve modifier to give it a bit of character (like on the Giant Viper).  In the end, I decided that I liked the look of a compound spiral, which is just me looking for a smart-sounding way of saying that I made the whole thing follow a spiral.  This screenshot is a little difficult to make sense of, but that orange line is between the control points of my curve, which are moving upwards in a generally spiral shape.  I added segments directly below and above the bottom and top of the spiral because I wanted to make sure that the top and bottom of my whirlwind pointed in a generally vertical direction.  With my curve defined, all I had to do was to put the Curve modifier on my whirlwind to make it follow that line (and a Subdiv to make it purty and those Boolean Differences to make it the right height).  And, here we go, a finished whirlwind, all ready for a demon to inhabit!

I wrote up Part 2, where I talk about how I made the the Wind Demon's hand!