Giant Dome Building (?)

I'm building a Taj Mahal structure and have gotten to the daunting part of the giant dome on top. Dome is pretty crucial, being one of the recognizable features of this building, and I'm wanting to get it right. I have monkeyed around with the suggestions from Ivory Tower of Primitives without much luck. Would love any suggestions out there.

Can respond here or in game and thank you in advance!

when in doubt, use a torus!

If you want it larger than 10x10 though it gest really hard, you will probably have to use a shape maker tool or something.

I think Cadroe Murphy has what you need, look in his profile online, he makes a tool that creates huge spheres, rings and domes. I've recently made a large dome with it.

The really amazing thing is that he gives it away for 1L$ !

I have a machine that makes geodesic domes of any size out of triangles. I live in a Geodeic dome made by the same machine so if you need to see what I am talking about take a look at my house on Cosy Home Island sim. Let me know if you think that would work, but I see from the pic that the Taj is really more of an onion shape than a dome.

I would try Cadroes tools first and if that does not work for you I would be happy to give it a try with my dome maker.

This thread came at a great time! I'm planning on making a large sphere building. I think I'll try both tools.

I have a question though, Dianne, does your dome maker cost anything and if so, how much?

Personally, I'm quite fond of Geodesic domes and it sounds quite appealing to be able to make one in game. (My boyfriend and I have plans for our future real home to be one. )

Jack - My ShapeMaker tool will only make perfect spheres, and your central dome is not spherical. There is a way you could use ShapeMaker to get that shape though, which is to build it up out of individual rings. Below is an example of something I made in this way. I imported an image of the saucer in profile to use as a guide and made the rings one at a time, adjusting the radius, height and tilt. Of course the more rings you use, and the more prims in each ring, the smoother the curve. Dianne's geodesic domes look good too.

using tools is the cheater's way
ive been building massive spheroid constructs incluind buildings, ships and stations with rounded and spherical parts for quite awhile now.. although its likely not as mathimatically correct as it could be with a object building tool, i find you can make things far more accurate building your spheres out of large square pannels. with a few quick figures and some basic math you can figure out the dimentions for each peice farily quickly, and you could have a dome of megalithic proportions in 1--20 minutes.
if you need a little help msg me in ganme and ill try to show you how its done.

Well I did not make the dome machine myself, it cost me money and its just a tool (an old and "finicky" tool ) It only reliably makes the structure itself and then I place all the triangle panels one by one, so also quite a labour intensive process for me to make one. So ....

I guess I was more offering my services rather than offering the machine or trying to sell domes.

Usually I do stuff like that for free, but I don't have tons of time either so it would all depend on lots of picky things like whether I had the time, or how big your project is.

Maybe I should start selling dome homes or something, I just thought that no one would really be interested. If you look me up on snapzilla, you will see not where I live now, but where I used to live in my *last* dome (I have always lived in domes). There are lots of pics and they will give you a real good idea of what to expect. Somethign like that I could probably build in a day and sell for some reasonable price, whatever that is.

Also, you should know that geodesic homes generally use tons of prims of course.

I'm really looking forward to seeing your Taj Mahal in SL--good luck & please post a landmark when you get it done (will you use it as a private home or offer it as a site for weddings or ???)

Also, Diane, I would like to have a geodesic home--or greenhouse/conservatory--with stained glass window panels in part of it (the illusion of privacy ) I'll IM in game to see what we can work out.

Yes, I figured that it would be pretty prim heavy. I do mostly hmm, geometric builds which I've found to be quite hefty depending on how close I make it to my original vision.

I'm fairly certain I could place the triangles myself, not that I know exactly what the process will be of course. I would hate to take up your time because my vision tends to change quite a bit as I get into a project. Nothing I make ever ends up exactly how I originally planned it to be. They tend to get more complicated and then I go through trying to simplify it later. Plus, so far I think this will be quite a large build.

Perhaps just the tool and a notecard with tip and tricks would be enough for me? Anyhoo, I may not even need it so no worries or anything. I haven't even begun building it by hand yet, which I think I will do once I've made myself some lunch.

An alternate way to make geodesic domes is to use Jeffrey Gomez's .obj importer, on the appropriate .obj file. The script is available here: /54/09/32283/1.html

Assuming you ccould get or make the *.obj file for it, this would actually be the best solution for the Taj Mahal problem that started this thread, and probably the least prim intensive.

I appreciate all the helpful posts very much, and trying some of this out tonight. What a great response Thank you!