I Need Help With A Certain Kind Of Roof

DaRkM

I'm trying to make a model of the BC Place Stadium in Vancouver but I don't know how to make the roof.
This is the roof

This is the shape of the building

Gaieus

Hi,

This is definitely something for the Soap Skin and Bubble plugin.

Yest I think your file will be rather heavy this way.

DaRkM

Thanks for the advice. That plugin looks like it could come in handy. I got the main shape with the follow me tool using a flat surface in the same shape as the stadium and half of a circle. Funny thing is, I got the idea of using the follow me tool by watching that how to make a hamburger tutorial. Haha
Now I just need to figure out how to get those dips in there.

ridix

Here is the top view from Google earth:

remus

Id definetly go for the soap skin method. If you could work the big rectangle in the middle in to a more square shape youd onyl have to do one soap skin which you could then turn in to a component and copy to make up the entire mid section of the roof.

Gaieus

Actually, if you started as a simple square, you could re.use a whole bunch of the roof elements and at the end (all grouped), you could scale it in one direction. Certainly there could be issues with precision.

DaRkM

I don't understand how to use soap skin.

Gaieus

First of all you have to activate it (if it isn't activated automatically) at Window (menu) > Preferences > Extensions. You may also have to activate the toolbar at View (menu) > Toolbars. Then follow the instructions here.

DaRkM

Yes I see the the tools for soap skin.

Gaieus

Have you read the help page I linked? You really need to experiment with it a bit before you start your final project.

DaRkM

Oh, woops. didn't see that. Thanks.

This is what I have without using soap skin.

BC Place Stadium.skp

Gaieus

I could even imagine to project that roof image onto the roof in your model - unless you reallywant to model it.

DaRkM

Yeah I'm thinking of just putting a texture on it instead of modeling the roof.

How do I make an image that would fit perfectly onto the shape? I have photoshop but I don't know how yo get the correct dimensions

Gaieus

Well, I'm not a texture master myself either but what I'd do is to crop the image as much as you can and try projecting it onto the surface. SU will distort it on the sides a little bit but that shouldn't be a very big problem.

ridix

I tried to do that by making the roof with hump on it. Than made my own texture to paint from satellite photo. But SU wants to paint individual surfaces independently! How do you apply / project single texture image on to multiple face?

DaRkM

When I apply with the paint tool, it just goes translucent.
I edited that image of the roof so it was just the roof with a transparent background.

EDIT: I tried changing the material dimension and it now looks somewhat like the above.

Gaieus

OK, this is what I did:

rotated the texture in Corel Photopaint so that the sides were parallel with the border of the image
cropped the image to the very border of the border of the roof in SU, I made a flat face with the exact outlines of the roof's bottom
applied the image on it as texture (of course it looked stupid)
right clicked and went to Texture > Position.
Made sure fixed pin mode is unchecked (right click)
Positioned the texture in free pin mode and when I was happy with it, right click > done (or hit enter)
right click on the image again, go Texture > Projected.
Now I sampled this image with the Alt+Paint bucket tool and simply applied it on the curved surface
It's not a very clean job but I didn't want to play with it longer.
Also tweaked the model a bit - you had ugly double faces and everything inside - but you can add them back if you wish.

BC Place Stadium-1.skp

DaRkM

Thank you very much It's my first time using SU so I don't really know how to use it correctly. I just copy and pasted one corner for all four corners and I knew it was ugly but I didn't know how to fix it.

I'm following your instructions but how do I apply as texture? and did you drag and drop the picture into SU?

Also how do I get that little person? It isn't there anymore.

Gaieus

I imported the texture via File > Import and there choose all supported image types. Now there will be an option on the right to import it as texture.

You can also import it as image and the explode it. You can also drag & drop an image into your SU model.

Bryce (the little person) is there in your file, go to Window > Components and your component browser will pop up. There go to "In model" (the little house icon) and there he is.

DaRkM

Thanks again. Though I do wish I could model it.