Rhino, Grasshopper, T Splines, and Maxwell House.
A pastiche of styles. The heads - minus the horns, vase body - minus the crown, and hooves were done with T Splines, everything else was Rhino and Grasshopper. The swirls were based on my Constant Slope Spiral definition here:
Every spiral that begins at a hoof winds upwards until it reaches one of the heads. The original definition assumed a surface that could be deformed into a tube or a disk, but I finally realized that it should work on a shape like the one appearing here. A further challenge was getting the spirals to snake all the way up and around without getting stuck in some local “valley”. For this def to work, the underlying shape needs to be a mesh, which was first created with T Splines, converted into a brep, and then remeshed with Mesh Machine with enough vertices to provide a smooth path.
Some details:
