Dome with smooth edges

Al Hart

Usually, whenever I want to find a dome component with smooth edges and good UV mapping, I simply go to the 3D warehouse and grab one.

However, for some reason, today, everyone I grab messes up the texture mapping. Was I dreaming before, or am I crazy today?

And/or can someone point be to a good dome component which will wrap textures?

3D Warehouse Dome

Gaieus

How about this one, Al?

Mapped with Whaat's UV Tools (it screws up the very top generally but don't look at it from above).

Note that I doubled the segments of both the base circle and the arc.

Dome.skp

charly2008

Hi Gaieus,

I have tried the UV-tool for the first time.It works perfectly except for the polar cap. How can I correct this?

Karlheinz

Gaieus

I am afraid you cannot. All the other facets are quads but these are triangles and that probably messes up the map (in SU, there are four texture positioning handle for each face and you cannot merge 2 into a singularity).

See if Whaat's UV Tools version 2 works for you (it exports then reimports the model into 3rd party apps)

Jim

Could you make them quads, then have only a very small, flat circle on top. Instead of a single vertex where the lines converge?

The image reminds me of Moe's hair from the Three Stooges, btw.

Gaieus

If you download my dome, that's exactly what I did. Maybe it could be even smaller.

However it stretches the texture this way, too.

Jim

@gaieus said:

If you download my dome, that's exactly what I did. Maybe it could be even smaller.

I see now - scaling the texture is not quite what you want. My eye was tricked, but the tiles should not actually be scaled as they are.

Gaieus

Yes, in the meanwhile I edited my previous post, too.

Solution - put a cap on the top.

Dome.skp

pilou

@unknownuser said:

Is there a plugin to create a Geodesic Dome.

Seems you have someone in the Components menu Shapes or in 3Dware house

Gaieus

If you want to know something about geodesic domes, our fellow member Taff Gogh is to search for. This is his 3D Warehouse contribution:
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=1f33552966b6f22224e5217d8a2e013a
and his Google Groups for Geodesic Domes:
http://groups.google.com/group/geodesichelp

But unfortunately, Al, I would doubt that a different shape on the top would help (albeit who knows?) It's where the image itself should also shrink to infinity. So speaking of skies, maybe one with a pure, blue colour on the very top could produce some not noticeable turbulence?

charly2008

Thanks for all your help. I will try out UVMapper.

Al Hart

@gaieus said:

Yes, in the meanwhile I edited my previous post, too.

Solution - put a cap on the top.

Can you show us a view from the top of the dome with a cap on top.

(Or was that a joke?)

Thanks,

Al

Al Hart

Thanks for your help on this Gai.

We need to get Whaat to recognize the triangles at the top, and assign the UV coordinates differently.

Alternatively, you could start with a Geodesic Dome which uses the same size for all triangles. Would Whaat's plug-on work for Geodesic Domes?

Is there a plugin to create a Geodesic Dome.

We tried to solve this when we were trying to improve the O3D dome for viewing panoramic images (which has the same problem at the top and bottom), but we weren't able to do it properly.

driven

2004 by Gavin Kistner- Geodesic_SketchUp.rb

don't remember where or when I got this, have you tried it?

john

pilou

Taffgoch serial domes is amazing

His PDF is a true gem!

Gaieus

Al, see the image I attached to that post. There is a yellow "cap" - just hiding the fact that we cannot properly UV Map that part.

Maybe half joke but at the same time, if you can find out something to put there, can be a workaround.

TIG

@gaieus said:

Al, see the image I attached to that post. There is a yellow "cap" - just hiding the fact that we cannot properly UV Map that part.

Maybe half joke but at the same time, if you can find out something to put there, can be a workaround.

This is as it would be in the 'real-world' - you'd have a special cap-stone or finial, simply because you can't use smaller and smaller tiles or stone to finish it - The builder WILL use a single 'thing'...

Gaieus

Certainly. Even the rest of the tiles mapped spherically is impossible.

Al Hart

I see my problem better now.

I don't want a texture mapping which gets smaller and smaller at the top. I want a texture mapping which is uniform over the entire dome - As if you placed an actual carpet on the dome.

To do this properly, I would probably need to make the dome out of hexagons, and have a "hexagon tileable" pattern to place on it.

I'm sure people must to this sometimes, but it is probably more difficult than I think.

driven