Larger IMPERFECT Spheres

I’m fully aware that it is possible to make shapes larger than the 10 meter limits of normal prims through the use of shape makers. In fact, I own and use (quite frequently) Murphy’s shape maker. However, my current project requires a large elliptical sphere – for those familiar, the back end of the ship Serenity from the Firefly series. Murphy’s maker can only make perfect spheres, but what about imperfect ones? At first, I tried to fudge it by making several rings with increasing tilt values, but that ultimately failed due to the orientation the ring prims are put in. I also tried to take a normal sphere and manually stretch each layer out. This seemed a little more successful, but still horribly inaccurate.

So does anyone know if there’s another maker out there that can make large stretched shapes? Or if not, can anyone offer some suggestions on how to make this shape?

I'm not aware of any ovoid maker tool, and I really never use automation for building anyway, so all I can talk about is how to do this by hand. You were on the right track by taking an existing spheroid and stretching each panel. Here's what I would recommend:

1. First, make a couple of orthographic diagrams of the shape you're trying to make. You want a side view and a top view, both drawn to scale. Front view isn't really necessary since it would just be a circle anyway.
   
   
   
2. Upload the diagrams as textures and apply them to flattened cubes (image planes).
   
   
   
3. Make your image planes full size, and arrange them 90 degrees apart, so they criss cross eachother in the middle. Now you've got a template to work on top of.
   
   
   
4. Now take your sphere object and align it so it's facing the same direction as the diagrams.
   
   
   
5. Seperate the rings of the sphere so that they're evenly spaced along the length of the elipse diagrams. In other words, put the top ring at the top of the elipse, the bottom ring at the bottom, and all the other rings inbetween at regular intervals.
   
   
   
6. Now select a panel that directly intersects one of the diagrams, and stretch it so that it's tangent with the elipse outline at both ends. Do the same for the equivilent panel in the next ring, and the next ring, and so on. Now you've got your first piece of "framework".
   
   
   
7. Make note of the exact size of the first piece you resized. Resize all the other panels in that piece's ring so they match, and then move them so they line up with the first one at the base he wide part).
   
   
   
8. Now here's the tricky part. Pick any two pieces in that ring, and resize the tops of both, one step at a time until they meet. Make note of that top size, and apply it to all the other panels in the ring. You should now have seamless ring again, just as if it had been built that way by the shapemaker i the first place.
   
   
   
9. Repeat the above two steps for each ring in the object, and within a few minutes you'll have your ovoid shape.

The process sounds complicated when it's explaines with words like this, but really it's very simple. It might take you a while to do this the first time, but after you've done it the first time, it shouldn't take you more than a few minutes to turn any paneled sphere into a paneled egg.

Couldn't you create a sphere and link it in slices and then flatten or stretch it?

Edit: oops, I see you tryed this.

I wonder why it did not work?

Edit again: The stretch would have to be centered by the shere center. This would either require linking oposite sides or stretching and sliding. Anuther thought would be a shrink and flatten each layer.

I would use Jeffrey Gomez's obj importer. You could either import an ovoid shape in the obj file, or import a sphere, then stretching the prim that the importer script is in will result in a stretched resulting build.

There used to be a tool called XyObjects. It was like ShapeMaker on steroids. It could do what your talking about... Make large-scale replicas of pretty much any prim shape.

Unfortunatly, it and it's creator both seem to have vanished months ago.