Creating a "Twisted Sphere"

I am not sure if "Twisted Sphere" is a good description of what I am tring to create but it's the best I could come up with. In blacksmith terms it is called a basket. It looks like a ball made of rope and I have not been able to come up with a way to create it in Sketchup. The attached file is an image of the item. Any and all ideas are appreciated.

Here's a rough sketch of the method I used to create the attached:

1) draw a stick-figure cube (erase the faces) as a guide for drawing the shape

2) using Bezier plugin draw the curved shape of one "rope"

3) erase the cube

4) using TubeAlongPath plugin give body to the rope

5) using Ctrl+Rotate tool, create 7 more copies at 45 degree increments

The easiest way to start your basket is with a ruby script, draw_helix13.rb (draw_helix14) that makes a tapered helix. A mirror of the helix will make the first twist. Read up on making a radial array to finish the shape. The other scripts listed in the skippy are optional - but they are nice to use. Scripts are at http://www.crai.archi.fr/rld/. Tips on keyboard combinations to use with the scale tool show up in the status bar. Scale+Ctrl (PC) is handy.

blacksmith basket.skp

Here's a 2D basket picket that (I think) Alan made for me awhile ago.

BasketPickets.skp

That looks god joe....well Alan. I like the canary. Nice touch :)

Chris Fullmer

That's perfect!

Thanks

The helix and tube along path worked great. I attached the result.

Thanks for the help

Basket1.skp