Crackmine's Shell Tutorial for Bryce

Ok, so our first step is to get metaballs

Now I'm going to skip the main part of this. but basically, get a general group of both positive and negative metaballs and attempt to keep the bottom smooth.

Leave a little roughness/ unevenness it will make the shell look natural. usually, if you want the exact shell I'm making, here’s the stats for my metaballs. (ignore the bit with the origin for now)

Ok, now that we have our basic shape, we set up color groups, I always put them with the textures I want them to have so I'm set with only these 3, and then we group them all (so we get this next bit right) and set it at (here’s a confusing bit) negative half the Z width, for instance if its 40, you put it at -20Z(position, not size), this is so the back end is exactly at 0, now, ungroup the whole thing selected it and go back to attributes. This time, unlock the origin(Little red lock between position and origin bars, click it to unlock) and set the origin to 0X,0Y,0Z

 

Next up is Multi-replication, the easy part hit alt-shift-D and the window will pop up first off, let me strongly much recommend you turn on Scale Translation, however its not required, and I've gotten some good results with it off, choose whatever.

So, as far as the setup for this goes, you can take mine, basically I just wanted it to go down, and scale down just a bit, or use your own. If you've been doing this with your own setup to be a rebel, and not like me, try putting on some y rotation and positive y movement, and lower the scaling to get a nice upward spiral.

This works a little oddly, because it seems to do it at the same time and not in an order so when you're using this remember that things won't quite work how you want, but you can always try again.

 

now we can do some touch ups, we have our basic single panel of the shell, and if you don't like how it looks, you can always change it, I don't personally think the points are sticking out quite like I want, so I scaled them a bit, if you don't like the idea that the tutorial is deviating from what you're doing, don't worry, we still love you.

 

Now we'll want to repeat the first few steps to get the origins back to 0 and set this whole thing as a unity, if you don't remember how... well... scroll up.

 

Now, we multi-replicate again, select the whole thing and, to get exactly 90 degrees we'll pick a nice number, 5, to rotate the Y axis, we want it to scale down, so I set the scale of xy and z to 97, and of course, 90 divided by 5 is 18, minus the one we have already, 17 (incase you wanted to know where I got the numbers this time. (make sure you keep the new ones selected)

So, we already have more metaballs than you could ever, ever hope for, and we get to double that number, yeah.. thats right, now, if you were a good little kid and kept the new ones selected you have no problems, otherwise, well, you get coal, so, hit ctrl-shift-A and it'll invert your selection, and if you have a plane, hold down shift and click it to deselect it.

Before we continue with the multi-replicate I suggest you turn off the auto update on the minipreview. Now, we go back into multi-replicate, and put the Y rotate to -5, quantity to 17, and scales for xy and z to 97, we get a happy result, a result that maybe even looks decent, but, unfortunately (due to metaballs) has a devastating render time .( I've found no real way to help this, sorry, now we can go to the last part of this tutorial, the materials.