Y’all have a handle on this handle challenge!

I’m impressed by the level of work that was submitted for the handle challenge! You sent in some great models. Special thanks to everyone who took the time to make something and send it to me to submit it to scrutiny.

I have included commentary on each model in the original post. There was plenty to say about all of the work. Where available, I included the comments of the person who sent in the model, as well. It is always interesting to see what’s going through someone’s mind as they work with shapes like this.

Each model has its strengths. Aside from Charles Culp’s production model images, the above image was probably the most professionally done, by Michael McCune. I like the saddle horn type effect on the end of Chris Huntley’s shiny example. James Canney made what I thought was the most involved model (top of this page). Lin Shao Dun submitted the most different techniques, including things he thought didn’t work well. I firmly believe you learn more from mistakes than from success. Dan C showed that if you can manipulate surface UV flow, you can gain some interesting design features from that control. R. Paul Waddington showed that even AutoCAD has some capability in this arena. Costi showed that subtleties are important, and even a flashy feature like Freeform is capable of subtleties. Itai Lewin was the only one to demonstrate how the Flex feature can be used to add organic shape to a model.

Again, I’m very impressed with all of this work. Thanks to all who submitted something. And for you lurkers out there, why don’t you try your hand? It’s fun, and you might learn something.

The next challenge will be coming in a week or so, and will be an airplane propeller.