Help with app

Hey folks, I have a question about software. I’m trying to find an iOS app or PC or Mac program that will do what I need. I want to create a hollow cylinder and be able to use a photo as the skin.

I then want to anchor one end of the cylinder while twisting the other, kind of creating a twist in the middle. I then want to be able fold the open end backward, over the twist, and have it meet flush with the anchored end. Basically, like in the pictures, except not flat.

That’s not going to be simple. At first, when I read your post, I thought, create a cylinder and skin it. No problem. Adobe dimension, or even 3D in Photoshop. For the rest, I am guessing you my need one of the Maya / cinema 4d type programs. Not sure if the goes beyond photoshop’s 3D capabilities. I don’t do enough of it to know – perhaps someone else here has more experience with it.

Another option is Blender, which is open source free software and pretty powerful. I did some work with it quite a few years ago, in its early incarnations and it was pretty good. Now, I believe, it a much more sophisticated beast.

However, if you have never done any 3D Ray-traced work, you are in for a pretty steep learning curve. You have to change your head a bit. We spend most of our time adapting a 3D world on to a flat, 2d plane. Working in 3D can get confusing at first. You have to think, quite literally, outside the box. It’s very easy to lose things behind the back of your head. That’s quite a project to start on. It may be better to find someone to help you out. Or at least start with a simple shape, lighting, rotating, positioning and image mapping that to get used to how It all works.

Good luck.

Thank you for your response. I really haven’t done any kind of designing or drawing before, but I’m pretty decent when comes to figuring things out. At first, I thought it would super easy to do, and I think that the twisting would be doable. I think the hardest part will be to pull the end back over itself. I hope that there is something out there that will do the manipulations that I want, and that it won’t cost $1,000’s.

Look at blender. As I say, it’s free, but just know that this is not going to be a ‘press the button and it happens’ kind of job.

No 3D knowledge is one thing, but no design background at all?! You are going to have fun and some late nights, I think. The kind of fun that is; I’ve never lifted the bonnet of a car, so I’m just going to bore the pots and replace the fuel injection system!

Enjoy. Let us know how it goes.

Like Sprout, I immediately thought about Adobe Dimensions, which does exactly that, until you mentioned twisting it and turning it inside out.

One of my clients is a software company that develops 3D modeling software for automobile crash testing. I have no real experience using their software, but I’ve become familiar enough with twisting, bending and distorting 3D spline models to know that what you’re needing is software with a learning curve that heads straight up into the stratosphere. Distort things too much and the models begin kinking and breaking.

Blender’s the obvious place to begin if you’re needing free or low-cost, but honestly, you’re starting out with a project that’s on the far side of difficult.

What is the end purpose of the twisted, folded art?
Animation or flat art?
What you describe is too torqued to realize in the real world using any kind of tension fabric structure.

The thing shown in the pictures is a tubular face cover. I was hoping to be able to design a set of 3D pictures on how to fold it into different configurations. It can be worn in 10 or so different ways, and some of the configurations aren’t that intuitive, so I wanted to make some instructions. As a best case, I was hoping to be able to turn it into an animation.