Method to model an intake manifold?

[snothanger69]

Hi,
I'm not too bad at modeling in general.
But there's one thing that's really giving me a tough time...an intake manifold for a V8 engine.
The type of manifold I'm talking about is something like the Edlebrock performer series manifold.

I've tried various ways to model one.
Like modeling the intake runners then trying to blend them into the square carburetor section.
Or starting from the carb. area and subdividing outwards.
But I keep running into problems. Because the runners blend into the corners of the carb. area where there isn't any way to blend smoothly.

It can't just be separate objects on top of each other. I'm trying to make a realistic looking one with all of those smooth blends from one shape to the next.
It has to be a single mesh object because of all of the shapes blend into each other.

Has anyone got an idea what the best method would be to do something like this?

I've tried SubD, Splines, and Point by Point. But there's just so many weird angles combined with smoothing that any type of traditional modeling approach isn't cutting it for me.

[therealpepe]

Maybe you should put up an image of what you would like to model.

or load up the mesh, so we can take a look at the real thing.

[snothanger69]

I really don't have any one specific design in mind.
Any type of carbureted V8 design is a good example.

I think what I'm going to do is create the various runners and the carb. mount area as separate objects. Then drop a plane object over the top of them to create a smooth aluminum casting type of look.

[snothanger69]

Here's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Everyone seems to fakes this part of an engine. And rather badly at that.
I want to make a proper model of it. But I can't figure out how to do it.
Everything I try fails to handle the complexity of this type of shape miserably.