In this article, I outline a method for constructing aesthetically pleasing sculptures containing spiral shapes. Since every face of an orientable manifold mesh can be given a consistent edge rotation ordering, if one applies an extrusion operator to each face of an orientable manifold mesh using the same rotation and scaling factors, each edge in the original mesh will be converted to an S-shaped region that consists of two spiral arms. The twirling nature of my sculptures results from these S-shaped regions. The final sculptures are obtained by smoothing the resulting shapes with a subdivision scheme. I discuss several methods for visually emphasizing the twirling nature of S-shaped regions. All the models and virtual sculptures in this article are created using the Topological Mesh Modelling system TopMod. 2009, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
