Spiral Shell

I created a series of shells using a basic process from the 'Blender 2.5 Hotshot' tutorial book involving a circle mesh and a hook & array modifier and then joining their edges of the arrayed circles together. I started quite simple, tweaking sizes and angles to create different types of shells before making this one. The Red Shell is loosely modelled after a nautilus and is constructed from two spirals, the first forming the main shell and the second to create the raised ridges.

Sometime before creating the shells I had noticed that a noise texture mixed with a transparent shader could create a nice soap bubble material, for the shells mother of pearl interior I modified this bubble material by mixing noise with a glossy shader instead and adding a displacement linked to a Voronoi texture.

For the renders I also targeted the cameras focal point to an empty, moving it to different points depending on the shell