I once tried to make one of these in Maya PLE a couple years back. If you’ve never heard of a Klein bottle, it’s a hypthetical geometric surface imagined by the mathematician Klein that has one side and no edges, since it flips and reconnects with itself like a Mobius band. Anyway, I was using Maya’s NURBS, in which holes can be “trimmed” for the bottle’s neck, but I never was able to make the surfaces connect the way I wanted.
A week or so ago, I thought I’d give it another shot in blender. It was deceptively easy. I finished a decent model in one afternoon.
Right now it appears quite plainly, but I am planning to use it in a larger scene (which is not built yet).
This will be my first serious use of YAF-Ray. Does my material look sufficiently glassy?
Looks great! The glass looks good, except needs a little more raytraced reflection. Be good piece to experiment with caustics in yafray, that’d look great! Good modelling.
Question for you: What technique did you use to make this? I tried making a Klein bottle using subdivision surfaces, and that obviously didn’t go so well – Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces don’t do so well with non-manifold topology. Could you post a wire or your .blend?
aquaglow - yeah, I want to use photons in the final version, but don’t want to do long renders before then… I’m only patient with the renderer up to a point.
meestaplu - oh, the model
is far from perfect. I only used the ‘spin’ tool to create the base and twist the neck, and the ‘shrink/fatten’ tool to make an inner surface. The neck is fused to the base crudely at best, but looks okay with smooth shading and level 1 subsurf.
Here’s another model I made for the same scene. A triangular Mobius band looped in a trefoil knot.
Modeling this was simple enough, but…
… anyone have ideas on how to UVmap the bugger?? :-?
