Hi All,
I’m trying to make a curved 3D arrow for a friend’s logo. I found an example of an arrow that comes close to what I had pictured. Please see the blue arrow in the top-left corner:
Does anyone know how to replicate that?
Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Ansel
I tried this a long time ago using Illustrator CS2. When I had a shaped skin wrap around a transparent cylinder it would not render the underside of that skin - so I’d have to add the same shape along the inside of the cylinder along the same slant. I don’t know if this handling of transparent 3D shapes has changed in recent releases.
I think you’d only need to make one full arrow, and then flip it over/reverse it for the inside skin. You can move the skin around in preview mode until you get the right placement. My try was with “ribbon,” just rectangles wrapped around the cylinder which didn’t need reversing. But eventually that didn’t look right so I just used layered shapes to get nice looking spirals. 
I’ve been meaning to go back and play around with this idea for the past… 5 years or so? There’s so much potential!
Hmmmm… I’m intrigued by the idea of skinning the transparent cylinder. So I would create the arrow I want, laid out flat? How do I anticipate the bottom of the arrow, once it’s wrapped around the cylinder?
Well, you could use the high-tech route and skin a 3D cylinder shape (transparent of course) with arrows - one inside and one outside, or you can do it the old-fashioned way and just layer shapes. The shine and shadows can be created using the Gradient Mesh tool.