YUDIbt

Hope everyone has seen twisted steel rods which are commonly used in constructions to give more strength to concrete works. These rods having a texture on its surface to make it rough and get bonded to concrete well. Have you ever thought how to model such rod for high-poly applications or how bake a normal map from it to be used for low-poly applications?
Today I am going to do the first; yes to model high-poly twisted steel rods by your own with few minutes.
First open 3D max as usual or Reset once if you have already worked with the 3D max. Now go to Customize menu and select “Unit Setup”. From the “Unit Setup” window, select “millimetres” as the unit and press OK to apply.

Go to Create > Geometry, select Cylinder as the Object type and draw a Cylinder in the Perspective view. Now select the created cylinder, then go to Modify, and set the Radius and the height of the created cylinder to 20.00 mm and 100.00 mm respectively. Then set Height Segments to 10,  Cap Segments to 1 and Sides to 14.
Select and right-click on the Cylinder object (you may use any viewport) and select “Convert to Editable Poly”
Now you should have something like below.
Go to Polygon sub-objective of the object and select two opposite polygon lines.
Select Bevel option under “Edit Polygons” rollout by clicking the small button in front of it. Set Bevel type to Group, height to 1.0 mm and Outline Amount to -1.0 mm and apply.

By keeping the polygon selection, then apply Extrude (just above the Bevel button) by keeping Extrusion Height as 2.0 mm and Extrusion Type as Group.
Now deselect the selected polygons and select following polygon pattern both sides of the two bevelled lines. (it is bit difficult to describe than select, hope you will understand the pattern by seeing the following figure. However the pattern should not include polygons next to bevelled lines)
First apply Bevel and then Extrude for the selected polygon group as early by keeping the same settings.
If you one correctly, you should get something like below.
Now select “Edge” sub-object level of the object. Go to Left viewport and select following edges.
Go to “Connect” option under the “Edit Edges” rollout and apply it with only one Segment.
Again go to “Polygon” sub-object level, select and delete all the polygons outside the newly created lines.
Exit from the sub-object level and go back to Perspective viewport.
Select the object and make 3-4 more copies and attached one behind another to be looks like a continuous tube. Use Snap option to this (I hope you know how to make copies and place them using the Snap option)
Select one object, go to Attach option under “Edit Geometry” rollout and attach rest of the copied options. Go to “Vertex” sub-object level and select the vertex rings where the objects are jointed. Go to Weld option under Edit Vertices rollout and apply it by keeping weld threshold at 0.01mm.
Then go to “Edge” sub-object level. Once you go to Edge, you will see some edge rings are already selected (it should be already selected if you haven’t done anything out of my steps). Press “Remove” button under “Edit Geometry” rollout so it will remove these rings except the two rings at the two ends.
Now, exit from the sub-object level and apply TurboSmooth modifier with 2 iterations. Now you should get something like below. If you happy with this, you can stop. If you like to make it twist, apply Twist modifier and increase the Angle to a value you like.
Hope you interested in this.