[Tutorial > Modeling] Onion Dome Flat Pattern

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This is reposted from the Pro User Forum as part of a discussion about creating a flat pattern for an onion-shaped dome.

As an alternative to Jim's nifty script, here's a manual procedure I tried:

The steps were:

Draw a profile of the dome. Try to make the segments of the arcs (I used three arcs) approximately uniform in size. I turned on endpoints with a value of two to see what I was doing.
Create the dome itself. I made this octagonal, which is what the one in the photo appears to be. Then I unsmoothed it.
Lay out a series of intervals on a vertical line corresponding to the lengths of the segments on the original profile. I used Xline.rb to turn a series of lines into guides to mark the intervals. Then copy the horizontal lines on one sector of the dome over to their corresponding positions on the vertical line.
Scale the horizontal lines by a factor of .5 to create a true half of the dome sector. Connect the dots.
Mirror the half to create a whole sector.
Copy the dome sector to a copy of the base of the dome and copy it around seven times. That's it.

Here's a more detailed picture of the last step: