Created on spec for an awareness ad about breast cancer. Cycles render with 400 passes, minimal photoshop cc.
Modelling the loop took surprisingly longer than expected! (I will never attempt to use curves for this method again. Curves go ape s*&t when you try and rotate them in 3D space. If anyone has methods for working with curves in this manner, please let me know).
Looks good, i would have tried it with curves first too, not sure wether i would have been more sucessfull!
Keep up the good work.
I myself do not love curves. Nice result, whatever method you choose.
Not sure what you know about curves so I’ll through this out and hopefully it will help. When I do ribbons, which is quite often, I start with a fairly low subdivided curve, this makes blocking the ribbon movement out easier, but it will be blocky and chunky. Also a tip that saved me when working with curves and rotation is control+t on the main point of a curve this enables you to tilt the curve however you want along an axis. Once I learned that I loved working with curves for line/ribbon animation. Hope this helps.
matthew/mofx
A very quick example of doing this with curves & tilt
Edit: Very nice btw! Which ever your method for making it, its still come out looking good and thats what counts.
Cancer-ribbon.blend (300 KB)
Thanks for the tips guys! Yeah, I had given up in frustration, and just did good ol’ plane modelling with a lot of tweaking and a subdivision surface to get the twists working.
Also a tip that saved me when working with curves and rotation is control+t on the main point of a curve this enables you to tilt the curve however you want along an axis.
Hah! It’s so easy when you know that trick. I wish I’d had that sooner - thanks 
XD I know how you feel, I made an animation once just of how messed up things look when you start rotating/scaling things. As a legitimate tip, though, there is a good way to work with them: Parent your object to the curve itself and then, when you want to scale or rotate or whatever the object, be it a ribbon or whatever, move the curve instead (which the modified object will follow) [I’m assuming you’re using a curve modifier]
Curves are actually qutie useful if used carefully… you can actually make some things really easy to do (like making a spring compress or extend) by just rotating the object itself slightly on one axis, and rotating in a different direction will do something entirely different, and so forth, so it actually turns the object into like a multi-channel animation hack. Hope this sort of helps 
Parent your object to the curve itself and then, when you want to scale or rotate or whatever the object, be it a ribbon or whatever, move the curve instead
Hey, nice tip TheDuckCow, thanks!
