Hey guys,
right now I am struggling with finding a way to model a low poly drill which later will be used as a weapon for a game character. Do you know of an easy way to add a spiral edge loop across the length of a cylinder? My first idea was to create a helix and then use it to project edge loops ontop of the cylinder, but i can’t find a way to do this. Would be great I someone could help me out 
The drill should look like the image beneath, just very low poly
Don’t know about game geo requirements, but using a helix and a cylinder, I got this:
986 points
Initialize cyl and helix
for the helix, set the profile with no taper to match the cylinder
append the helix to cyl and size it to match diameter
merge, then taper
Split groups
Next I used the select lasso and clicked the helix to isolate a center strip of polys and deleted hidden
Then extract the strip and merged again.
I guess you’d have to figure out how to combine them
Thanks a lot for the reply and help, Thor!
Looking really good, but the part that drives me crazy is to combine the two seperate meshes to one continuous. There might be a few other options…I will post my results
You can combine the meshes with dynamesh.
This is something that’s easy to do working at high poly levels in Zbrush with multiple meshes. I’d draw your attention to two operations in the Deformation menu–Twist, and Taper. Using these operations with the proper axis selected, you’ll find you can twist objects, then taper them after the fact if it might be easier to get what you’re after on a straight object first.
However, for the sort of thing you’re after…deliberate topology on a single mesh at low poly levels, I probably wouldn’t choose Zbrush as the tool to do this with, but rather a dedicated low poly modeler with a more extensive polygonal and parametric toolset. It IS possible, but it is going to be overly fussy to do. I would start with a cylinder or cone with the lowest possible polycount—with as few vertical sections as possible, resulting in long horizontal polys. Then convert the quads to tris. One way to do this is to use Decimation master and decimate it at 100%. Then you have a spiral pattern of diagonals that can be beveled or extruded, and you can manually delete the horizontals with the Zmodeler brush if desired. It will be tedious, but it will make it much easier to work with the diagonals.
Hopefully this will point you in the right direction for the effect that you want with some experimentation.
P.S. It should also be mentioned that the parameters for the 3d cube primitive include a “twist” setting in the Initialize menu, that can also be used to make drill-bit like cylindrical objects that can be tapered after the fact with the taper deformation slider.
The ZModeler>Edge Actions>Close Hole has some neat twist options for convex holes. Check out the ZClassroom video.
