geometry

[malankkaa]

Hi,

Does anyone know how to create this type of geometry?

All the videos or tutorials I’ve found show how to build a similar form using Editable Poly, and then cut it with sections or rectangular shapes to create gaps between the wooden elements — but it doesn’t look as good as this 3D model.

Does anyone have an idea how it could be made?

Using an array and applying Twist or FFD doesn’t work well either.

[leeminardi]

You might consider starting with a NURBS ruled surface.  From there you can slice it to create the center lines of the parallel boards from which you would need a script to create the boards from the slice end points.  Better yet, start with a ruled solid and use a boolean substract o a series of boxes to create the boards.  

[Noren2]

What do you mean by "doesn't look as good"?

Directly modeling the object itself will give you lots of control, but you might end up with distorted elements, while one of the key aspects of your example is that it is built from regular shapes. Loft and Path Deform give you the option to drive the rotation and scale with a curve, but it might be hard or require a lot of fiddling to get a specific target shape. You could then continue by slicing again, or you extract one side of your object or single loops or spline segments to rebuild the individual boards with extrude and/or shell in case of distortions.

Your best bet and the most intuitive aproach might be to animate the position of your board with a path constraint, set keyframes for scale and rotation where required and snapshot in regular intervals. You could build a rough template for orientation first, if needed.

Then attach to one object if required, Reset Xform if necessary and do your bevels as a last step.

[Diffus3d]

I always did this sort of thing with the snapshot tool.  used to model springs in maya this way too, universal concept.  

[MartinBeh]

You could just animate a box-shaped object through space, enable Ghosting to see a preview of the individual time steps while you edit the animation, and once you like what you see you could use the Snapshot tool as suggested by @Diffus3d