By the way, one thing that can be nice with a grip like this is to draw a slightly curved path in the Top view like this:



And then do another similar shaped one in the side view, so that they cross each other like so:



Then you can select one, and run the Construct > Sweep command and select the other one as the path, to make a kind of shallowly rounded surface like this:



That can then be mirrored and placed around a thicker extrusion part like this:



Then use a boolean to cut the extrusion by those curved surfaces, that will slice it up into pieces, and you can delete these pieces:




To get this kind of a result where there is a bit of a contour to the sides of the grip instead of it being totally flat like a regular extrusion will be:



- Michael

Hi Nigel,

> Hi. I think this is one where Polygon Sub Division Surface
> modelling would give better results especially if the sides
> are not meant to be flat.

It kind of depends on what sort of non-flatness you are trying to get.

If you want something that is kind of broadly curved, the technique above using a sweep to build a slightly curved cutting surface can work pretty easily, and that method of crossing curves lets you get that shape just by drawing 2 curves.

If you wanted something that had a kind of intentional lumpyness around each finger grip then something that's less uniform like that would become more into the sub-d type territory.

- Michael

Also if you want some additional curvature in the other direction, instead of doing an extrusion you can instead set up 3 sections like this with one larger one in the middle and do a Loft to create the base block instead of extrude:







- Michael

Handy-dandy cool tut! :)

WOW!!! Michael, thank you for taking the time to do all that work and explain in such detail! You certainly went above and beyond by even adding such improvements as giving the grip's sides some curvature. I will try a few more creations with the demo using your methods to get proper fillets, and will even try loft where I may not have thought of using it before. Thanks again!

-eepo

The slightly curved in both directions surface can indeed be pretty nice, I believe in designer speak its even officially got the nomenclature of "pregnant surface" and it's not hard to see how it got that description.