Rounded shapes with hard surface modeling (lubricant bottle)

Question

Working in Blender 2.82a and I’m working on my hard surface modeling skills.I keep getting stuck. One of the things I find most difficult, and cannot find many answers too, is how to create something like swirls or rounded indents (don’t really know how else to describe it).

To illustrate what I mean, here is the image of the motor oil packaging I'm trying to recreate. The swirl with the dots is what I have the msot issues with. This is something you also see a lot on laundry detergent packaging or bleach packaging::

To illustrate what I have started to do is this: 1. Create a cube roughly the shape I need. 2. Add edge loop, remove half of model, add mirror modifier 3. Add in subdivision surface modifier 4. Create supporting edge loops to keep a rounded square appearance 5. And I thought creating the swirls would not be so difficult. I’ve tried to move the vertices to get a more rounded shape, but I failed. To be more precise, I went around every view and tried to model it exactly how it looks from every view, but I get stuck at making it look more rounded. I thought that maybe something like sculpting would help, but the edges are either not crisp enough, or I can’t get the shape I want. It almost seems so simple that I cannot find anyone talking about this specifically.

Here is were I got to:

As an example something like this would be my goal. Different shape but the same types of swirls and indents I'm looking for:

How do you handle a model like this? I've tried to figure this out for a long time, but I really need someone to at least point me in the right direction. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Here are 2 methods.

You can use the picture of your object as a blueprint and draw its profile on a flat plane, then make some extrusions, bevels to round the edges, etc...

Or you can use a method like yours, directly beginning with a 3D cube, then edge loops and extrude, but you have to keep in mind that you need to go from the general shape to the details, don't begin with details like bevels unless the general shape is good.