Modelling Maya- Having trouble making a dome

salacious_Crumb

Hi

I feel a little stupid posting this as I'm not a complete newbie, but I'm having trouble modelling this dome. I want to do it as accurately as possible and there must be an easy way. With booleans perhaps? You can see how far I've got. The dome is basically a half sphere, the edges of which touch the sides of the arches in the centre. Its the curving corners above the pillars I'm having trouble with:






How would you go about making it? Any help welcome!
(and please don't shoot me down for asking stupid questions.)

GoodAsNew

I think the best way making domes and stuff with perfectly circular form is to build it first with nurbs then convert to polys later.

Nurbs are much easier to mod into different kinds of simple curvy shapes.

Booleans are fun too.

salacious_Crumb

Ok still having trouble making this accurately. Its the arches above the columns I am having most trouble with.

Heres what I've got so far. I created a CV curve, snapped one end to the corners of the columns, and revolved it creating the dome. Booleaned this out of a cube. Then created the arch shape and booleaned this out the cube shape creating what you can see in the second picture.
All looks ok at first glance, but from a top view the inside of the arches are'nt straight. The ones in the photo are though.

I could pull and push vertices around, fudge it, but this doesn't seem very accurate. Any idea where I'm going wrong?

GoodAsNew

Question is that how geometrically perfect is the dome in reality. More important is that the arch is pretty much correct I think.

GoodAsNew

If that dome was a nurb with just few like 4 isoparms you could easily pull some control vertices while keeping the dome neat I think.

I'll try to make something similar for test when i get home from work.

salacious_Crumb

Yeah I start off with a CV curve that only has 5 points and move those about. I rebuild and smooth it to make sure its... smooth. Later i turn it into polygons so I can use boolean. I'm not so good with nurbs.

The way I see it is its got to hit these three points and still remain a smooth dome.
-the top of the dome in the picture
-the top of the arch
- and the bottom of the curve is in line with the corner of the pillar.(I've rotated the curve 45 so you can see it in the side view.) eg. I start the curve by snapping it to the corner of the cube at the top pillar, and finish it in the centre. Then I rotate it 45 degrees so i can work on it ortho in the side view.

anyway... I'm begining to wonder whats more important, keeping the corner pieces as smooth curves, or keeping the arches straight? I plan for it to be for game art anyway, so maybe the accuracy wont show as much...

salacious_Crumb

and then tiling them kinda sucks as the arches overlap:

sprunghunt

If you look at your reference the dome is only completely dome shaped after it rises above the level of the arch. The span between the arches is not curving at the same rate as the rest of it.

malcolm

I'd build the arches and the top of the dome first, once that's all planar and snaps up correctly then fill in the triangle shaped bits between the arches and the dome.

GoodAsNew

yes that what malcolm said might be the best way to do it.

I tried making that dome and arch thingy with perfect nurb circle shapes and it will look totally different if its done that way. If you want to follow the reference then its impossible to make it geometrically perfect.