Domes

Hi I've been on SL for a while and now i've gotten the building bug. so my question is does anybody know whats the best way to build a Dome larger than the standard 10x10

1. Build it up using a lot of trapezoidal panels (simple to compute).

2. Build a geodesic dome (more complex to compute but very elegant-looking) ... use a soccer-ball as a pattern for the tiling of the hexagons and pentagons.

3. Build an icosahedron (using triangles, and simple enough) or dodecahedron (using pentagons). If you use a dodecahedron you can make each of the pentagons low height pyramids since the shape the pentagons are built from is a triangle.

4. Build something like the EPCOT dome ... unfortunately that sends the prim count through the roof. (er, no pun intended)

My own method is to make something dome-like, but not a true dome... use a dome or cone for the pinacle, a hollowed flat piece for the next, and then cylinders and part-spheres to move down to the next... lather, rinse, repeat...

Conventional domes are nice, but boring after a while. Also, remember, 10m is quite large... it's almost 33 feet

Thanks for the info Aodhan and Siobhan will try those ideas out soon if u hear screaming u know i've turned into a raving lunatic and given up lol. thanks again

I'm wanting to do something similar but I want to make an arc that is over 20m in diameter... I know I need to make it from sections but don't know how to make the radius higher. I'd rather not make it from flat panels if I can avoid it... cheers!

There are at least four tools for doing big spheres.

SphereMaker by sparti Carroll
ShapeGen by Cadroe Murphy (which is mentioned in the link provided)
One whose maker I can't remember (Berti? Betty?)
And whatever Nand Nerd is doing

I love them for making octagonal sets of colonnades/pediments. For spheres themselves you'll blow out your prim count pretty quickly. Luckily SphereMaker allows you to make parts, or even just a single row of prims as part of a sphere, rather than the whole sphere. Spheremaker also has a slightly larger toolset for textures and a cooler 'build' animation (lol, for what it matters).

Cadroe's tool is cheeper by quite a bit, has some slightly differnt texturing options, but you end up manually deleting prims you don't need.

Personally a few weeks ago I went to town with Bernini and Borromini domes and had great fun recreating a few. The result were some 72-prim beauties that are utterly unusable as sale items.

Hi

I have now released all the source code for my builders (well I've done Sphere Maker, Block Pyramid Maker and Room Maker so far).

You can buy (for L$1) from SLX or in Chessport (pay the objects near the telehub L$1).


I want to make a general building object which will be Open Source and contain all my builders. Please send any improvements/code changes &c. back to me if you can so that I can incorporate them into the centralised code.


If you IM me I'll drop you the objects for free. I'm only charging L$1 so I can track how many people get them (from me directly anyway - they are obviously TRANS/MOD/COPY).



sparti Carroll

I don't remember the name (ShapeGen maybe) but it kicks ars for making domes and small planets! Though I haven't figured out how to get the texture to split evenly...

Room Maker? Sounds interesting...

- Jolan

The other option is to use "huge prims". I think there is a 40m sphere, which can be cut and hollowed. the main disadvantage is you can't adjust the size (and huge prims might not be permitted in the future)