Bacteriophage Geometry Finished

Between school projects I've finished the base model for the Bacteriophage.  So far it's been an interesting project, but not as challenging as I had imagined.  Soon I'll be augmenting it with a proper rig to animate how it delivers its DNA to a host cell, but for now it's largely static.  Although it is mostly complete at this stage, some tweaking and reworking may go into it as the project progresses further.

The one part of the model that really had me sit and think about how to go about making it was the main body connecting the base and head.  All of the references I found showed the body with spherical structures arrayed in a spiraling pattern leading from the top to the bottom.  I did several tests with a cylinder as a base before I had a flash of memory to a school project where we learned one way to model a car tire; In that project we essentially made a small section of the tire, duplicated that section into a strip, and then used a bend modifier to bring it around into a ring.

I used the same method for the Bacteriophage body, but started with two strips offset by half the width of one single face in order to produce the spiraling pattern as opposed to straight up and down rows, which you can see below.

I then used the bend modifier to bring the ends of this strip around and duplicated the resulting shape downwards to assemble the body.  After that was done, I set about shaping the head - A very quick task since it was simple, a closed hexagonal shape.

The next step was assembling the baseplate, and in doing so I kept in mind that organisms this small tend to have bodies shaped following strict geometric rules, and so used the head as a lead and began modeling a base.  The only issue I found was that some references showed it as a solid cylinder, but others showed it as a complex knot of shapes, so I made a compromise between the two and created a spoked design.  I also noticed on some of the more detailed references that there was an outer and inner ring to the structure, and just like the structures of the body I had the connecting arms of the two rings offset to be halfway between one another.

Here you can see the un-smoothed baseplate, not too complex but it did take a bit of figuring to work properly.    The overall model had a mesh smooth modifier applied to provide a more organic shape to the model.