I'm talking about the stack of toroids in this post. My first attempt is on the left. I literally stacked up a bunch of toruses, overlapping them to create a "solid". It renders well enough. I was dissatisfied with the number of faces, however. Feels like bad style to me, and I don't like the idea each of these is a separate mesh.
Enter take 2, the one on the right. This one is a cylinder. I put 40+ loop-cuts around it. I selected every 4th loop cut and scaled. These became the high point of each toroid. Then I grabbed the same loop cuts and the ones adjacent, and scaled these until I had the shape you see below. It's a single mesh and feels better. However, to make it, I had to laboriously select dozens of loop cuts and eyeball them into a toroid. Took a long time. I wanted to add a few more of the toroids to the bottom, but I couldn't see how to do it except by duplicating the mesh and shrinkwrapping the duplicated section to the bottom. It works but it isn't perfect. What a pain.
How would a non-beginner bang this mesh out without it being such a manual and fiddly process?