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Drawing a Flame Finial

comments (6) February 4th, 2011 in blogs

David Richards, contributor

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I've been asked several times to show how to draw a flame finial. Here's one way to do it. I used three different plugins for this; Tools on Surface, Weld, and Extrude Edges by Rails. I created the finial shown above in the video. It took about five minutes to draw it and is shown in real time. I had a little trouble with the audio so you might want to turn the volume down at the beginning.

By making components of the surfaces before copying them to complete the finial the file size of the final shown in the video ended up at 129 Kb.

This finial is a variation in which I rotate/copied the original helix through 75° and then made another copy at 90° from the first so that the concave area is quite wide and the ridge is narrow. You could play with different shapes for the overall profile and different angles of rotation to get a different appearance.

-Dave

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Comments (6)

DaveRichards writes: Raul, what tools are you missing? I provided links to the non-native tools I used in the text of this blog post. Is there something else you're missing?
Posted: 6:20 pm on October 15th

Joinery writes: I tried to do this but failed. I am new to skectch up and some of the tools used are not on my version. Would be cool if you could discuss where the tools come from
regards
Raul
Posted: 10:11 am on October 15th

DonzoB writes: David,

Thanks for this!

I tried to do this a few weeks ago, but failed badly.

I knew I could count on you!

Don "Dances with Wood" Butler
Posted: 1:36 pm on February 12th

DonzoB writes:
Posted: 1:34 pm on February 12th

DaveRichards writes: Thank you, Michael.

Give it a try. You'll find you can quickly make all sorts of variations with no trouble.

-Dave
Posted: 6:52 am on February 6th

mrossk writes: that was a fun one, Dave, thanks!
Posted: 12:02 am on February 6th

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