Twist or Bend a line/plane

[Morne]

Hi all

I have a line in plan that has been extruded (or sweeped - or given a render and viewport thickness) Whichever way it comes to the same thing.
I want the pivot of the extruded line to stay at 0 in the Z, so basically on the ground. Then in some sections, I want to twist the top part DOWN, to the bottom so that the line now lies horizontal, parralel to the ground, instead of it's usual vertical position. It should be a smooth twist down and not step. Think of a corkscrew type of deal, except the inner or bottom edge will never move.

Here's a a screen grab of a simplified version of it (the one I'm doing however is much longer and has many more turns in plan)

Any ideas?

I tried various things but so far nothing automated or remotely accurate. I'm sure there must be a SIMPLE solution, but I'm not seeing it at the moment.



Afterwards I want to add a shell to give it some thickness, or sweep it beforehand...

[Donald2B]

Why not just use the Twist deformation inside of a Loft object.

Just make sure that your shape's pivot point is at the base of the shape so that when you apply the twist, it twists along the spline.

Loft Twist.zip

[beestee]

1. Start with splines defining the upper and lower extent with matching vertex numbers
2. Attach them to be a single spline shape
3. Put a cross section modifier on the spline shape
4. Put a surface modifier on the cross section modifier
5. Put a shell modifier on the surface modifier