General Half-Life 2/Architecture
description
Domes don't just have to be models, create a brush based version.
keywords
domes, dome, create dome, creating, create, torus, torus tool.
I looked through the tutorials for creating inner domes and was pretty scared to try any of them. I reasoned that there must be a better way to create these things without displacements, and with vertex editing. Well after many hours of tinkering I found a novel way to do this. Although you’ll need to use vertex editing to “fit” your dome into your map, you will *NOT* need vertex editing to create the dome! So sit back, get some popcorn and watch.
The first thing we need to do is decide on what size to use. You can choose this arbitrarily as we can easily resize our dome when we are finished.
Start with a blank palette, select your trusty NODRAW texture, click on the brush tool, and under “Objects” select “Torus.”
Size your box to 1024 x 1024 x 1024 and hit enter. Make sure your settings are what is shown in the image below:
Press Ok:
Interesting eh? Ok but it’s not quite a dome yet, we need to do a few more things. Select the bagel-slice, right-click, and select “ungroup.”
If you look closely at the dome you’ll see that the dome curves upward like we want, but then, at a certain point (the apogee), it curves back down into a point:
We want to get all brushes that make the downward curve and group them:
Select this grouped object, hit ctrl-m (Translation) and rotate it 180 degrees around the y axis:
When you are done you’ll have something like this:
Now move this piece up and fit it to your dome. Make sure you line up the edges that make the inside of the dome—it should fit like a glove:
The next step is to squish the object to make a continuous arc for the inside of the dome. Repeat the next steps until you get it just like you want:
1. Squish the top down
2. Ungroup the top part and unselect the next ring of brushes.
3. Regroup the upper brushes
4. Squish the top down
5. Repeat until you get it like a dome.
Now the top surface will be all disjointed, but we don’t care! The inside surface will be as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Also, this can be resized to fit inside whatever you want.
Let’s texture it, stick a “light” in it, put it in a hollowed out skybox brush, and see how it looks!
Not too bad for 15 minutes work, I’m sure if you spend a bit more you can make your dome curved like you want. Have fun!
PunxsutawneyPhil
