Continued Manipulation

After last week and manipulating the surface from the guitar, I decided to go back and explore the effects of melting on the form.  Though last week I explored how melting effected the geometry, I did not include that deformation in the final print.  With that in mind I wanted to try and see what further manipulation I could achieve by including melting in the final form.

As I explored this further, I discovered that by rotating the axis of the melt modifier, I was able to achieve a completely different effect on the geometry.

I became particularly interested in the way that the geometry collapsed on itself.  I was careful to ensure that the geometry did not hit the "ground" as part of this manipulation.  Happy with the results of the melt, I decided to go back in the stack of this form to see if there were any earlier modifiers that if changed would have an interesting effect.  Looking back, I discovered that changing the twist that was applied earlier in the forms development has a particularly interesting effect on the new melt.  You will notice that this geometry and its thickness is a lot smoother than last week.  During this new process, I discovered that the melt ended up pulling along the normals of several quads.  This resulted in the folding of these quads, creating bad geometry.  To counteract this, I applied a smooth modifier as the final operation in the stack.