How to model a pillow in Rhinoceros 5

Hello!
(Thanks to Toby Humphrey for making some corrections in my grammar and making this tutorial readable)
It’s me again, Matus. Several people have asked me how to model a pillow in Rhinoceros, which I have been using in some of my scenes. Instead of just sharing this model I am going to show you how to do it! Here is the final product:

This tutorial is going to be very quick, the whole modelling process took me approximately 10 minutes. This model was done in Rhinoceros 5 WIP, so you can see me using Gumball tool, which is not included in Rhinoceros 4. (but you can download it for Rhinoceros 4 as a plugin from official McNeel website, or use the one from T-Splines toolbar, if you have it.)
Okay, let’s begin: First of all, we need to make a square, 400×400mm and explode it:

Press Ctrl+A to select all of these 4 lines, type the Rebuild command and press Enter. Set the ‘Point count’ from 2 to 10 and the ‘degree’ from 1 to 3 (the degree number 3 will make curves from our simple lines). You can always click the image below to see a full resolution screenshot.

Select all the curves and press the F10 button to show the control points. Select the ‘top view’ and drag the corner points a little bit inside the square, creating filleted corners.

Now drag all the other control points in and out of the square, so they will be placed randomly. This forms basic frame for upholstery surfaces.

Duplicate these curves and move them up vertically by 75 mm.

Hide the original curves, so you can see only the duplicated ones. Again show the control points (from the menu, toolbar, or by pressing F10).

Now the INSERT KNOT command: It is not necessary to rebuild the entire curve with 20 or 50 control points to make it super-detailed. All you need is to insert some knots close to the places where you need your curves to be more detailed.

And this is it. Make some deviations on these curves. Remember we are still in the 2D ‘top view’!

Now for some more fun. Switch to the ‘perspective view’ and make some new deviations in the UP/DOWN direction where required.

Do the same with original curves, which have been hidden until now.

The corner control points on the lower curves must move up and the corner control points on the upper curves must move down!

Create a line (length 150mm) and move it vertically up by 50 mm.

Rebuild the curve, just as in the picture (click on the small picture to see a full resolution version).

Drag the control points up and down to make them look more random.

Make 4 new lines connecting the corners of curved squares with endpoints of the new curve:

Explode these lines (just in case you drew polylines) and rebuild them:

Select these lines again, show the control points and adjust their position, again in the up/down direction.

This is now how it should appear in Rhino:

Okay, now for some more new curves…Use the ‘polyline’ tool to connect the middle points of the last four curves.

The explode & rebuild:

Show the control points again and adjust their position:

Now for the surfaces:

Okay, now that we are done with the boring stuff let’s work on the actual 3D surfaces. Keep in mind one important rule: DO NOT JOIN SURFACES! Okay, select the curves as you see in the picture and then select the ‘curve network’ option from the ‘surfaces’ menu.

Click ‘okay’ in pop up window and you have your first surface complete. Nice, isn’t it?

Repeat the same for the rest of these curves, resulting in the upper part of the pillow:

Select all the surfaces in the model and uncheck the box called ‘show surface isocurves’ leaving you with clean organic surfaces with no additional isocurves.

Select the border curves for lower part of the pillow and create a surface as we did previously.

Create layers and organise the scene items into them.

So this is where we are now:

Hide all the surfaces, so that only the curves are visible. Make some additional curves, as shown in the picture:

Once again rebuild them:

Adjust their position (using the control points).

Create some interesting geometry:

And that’s it for the curve adjustments.

Create a new surface in the same way as before, by selecting the ‘curve network’ option from the ‘surfaces’ menu.

Do the same with the other curves.

So now we’ve got it! The surfaces are finished. Categorise them into layers.

Show all the surfaces and hide all the curves. Now we have an almost completed pillow.

Great, now for the final part: The piping.

Select the border curves, join them and use command ‘pipe’ to create a pipe running along their length using a radius of 1.5mm.

On the other curves, use ‘no cap’ option, so you have only surfaces (not polysurfaces). Use radius of 1.2mm.

Finally, we have completed all the modelling!

In next step we will map textures and render the scene, but until then you should try to model this pillow. In case of any problems, please use the comments area below. Have a nice day!