It's coming along little by little. One of the toughest things was to make those stairs and get them to line up right with the plaform. Nevermind those "MILLIONS" of vertical railing poles and trying to get that texture right and have it match the horizontal rails. Pipes? Yeah, we got them, too. LOTS AND LOTS OF EM'. What the hell was I thinking when I started this. Hey, next time I say I'm going to model something of this magnitude, can somebody just bash me in the head repeatedly until I come to my senses? Seriously, though, I am enjoying modeling this even though it is a tough one. I'm being anal about precision and making sure things line up right and fit the way they should. In the long run, I guess it pays off. (Somebody please convince me of that) I still have a couple of large sections to model including the cranes and the main drilling tower. That will be the HUGE electrical looking tower sticking out of the top of it. Texturing it will be a whole different story, but I am running ideas through my head as to how I am going to do it as I am creating it.

"Hey, next time I say I'm going to model something of this magnitude, can somebody just bash me in the head repeatedly until I come to my senses?" Don't count on it lol, I like this model :) if you have more ideas like this that's only a good thing :)

That's a really cool modeling work, cant wait to see the textured version.

That is really coming along nicely. Can understand your pain at those bloody railings.... thats why I stick with castle walls ;). This is going to look pretty good sitting above a stormy sea or something :)

Boomer you are a true roughneck, definately a daunting task. btw, I wouldn't smack a guy that works on one nevermind a guy that built one. ;)

This is coming along great! Can you post a reference pic...for comparison? (Or is this all out of your head?

One solution for those millions of railing posts: Instead of making posts and rails, create, say, a thin vertical box representing the railings (one on each side of a stairwell). Make this positive. Then create two thin boxes and make them parallel to the angle of the stairs. Make these intersect and group them with the vertical boxes. Now you have the railings. You can then use multi-replicate to make thin vertical boxes going across the stairs, which when made intersect will look like posts. This will reduce your object count by at least half.

I thought I would follow up my suggestion with some notes.

In this image, I show a simple stairway on the right. On the left, in rose glass, are the intersects for the railing posts. The second from the left shows in green glass the posts and rails, which would be positive. Group the positives and the intersects (and change the materials) and you get the post and rails seen in the third from left. This is much easier to do than making individual posts and rails.

This approach is even better with deck railings.

In this image, the top elements represent the intersect as well as a slightly smaller negative object. In the center you see all the posts and rails. When you group all these, and change the material, you get the posts and rails seen at bottom.

This technique is extremely versatile. For example, all your rails for a given deck level can be defined by only two objects, no matter how complex the external contours are of the deck.

For a final example, this image took about a half hour to make and has only 46 objects, plus the ground plane. The two railings (the center one and the top one) are simply two very flat cube ploygons.

Thanks for the feedback, guys. Redneck, thanks for the info on the multireplicating. I'm still trying to learn how to do it. Confuses the hell out of me half the time, so I just place things by hand. Are there a tuts around that you know of that explain it? Bryster, here is the reference I'm using. The model comes from the Dosch Engineered structures set. I was looking through them and opened the rig up in Bryce. After looking at it for a few minutes, I figured I can replicate this bad boy on my own. Everything is being modeled with primitives and booleans.

I sure hope you got those posts textured BEFORE you started duplicating them. Or at the very least assigned to the same group. It is coming along beautifully.

Boomer, this is coming out really great! I'm sure this is going to look awesome, even more than now, with textures in place. Really looking foreward to the finished product. Redneck, thanks for the tuts, nice job on presentation too!

Boomer: Thanks for the ref pic.......You've certainly got it covered....!

WOW!!!!!

Thanks for the support, guys. Means a lot. I'll post another progress image when I make some headway.

The technique I described above works very well in building that oil drilling derrick. I think you will be able see all the steps by examining this image.

The first step is to work out the dimensions. Personally, I have developed a scaling system to ensure that everything I model is at the correct size, and it is based on the size of an average human (in my case, 1 Bryce Unit (BU) = 10cm so that a human is 17.5BU tall; this would be too small a scale for what you are doing, but you still need to settle on to a single, fixed conversion). I eyeballed the sample you posted and played around moving some objects around before I finally worked out the dimensions and got to work.

1. Since the tower is a stretched pyramid shape, you will need a long pyramid object which will be your intersect object. Inside the intersect pyramid (slightly smaller in dimensions) is a negative pyramid. These are shown in rose glass material (later changed to the tower material).

All the rest of the objects are positive.

1. Add two horizontal plates. The lower one will be turned on its Z axis to become a diagonal brace; the upper one will stay as it is as a horizontal brace. Make them different families (colors) so you can easily select one or the other. Multi-replicate them 12 times, moving up on the Y axis.

2. The time-consuming part is to go in by hand and rotate all the diagonal braces on their Z axis. You have to do this by hand because each rotation is different owing to the shape of the pyramid. Every time you rotate a plate, dupe it and then open the attributes menu and reverse the Z rotation (ie, change -34.00 to 34.00).

3. Once you have done all the front and back diagonals, select them all (using the family select), dupe them, group them, then rotate the group 90 degrees on the Y axis. Voila, all your diagonals are done.

4. For the corners, you just need to make a thin panel that extends the length of the tower. Rotate it 45 degrees on its Y axis. Dupe it and change the Y rotation to -45 degrees.

5. Select everything, UNGROUP to make sure you don't have any unnecessary groups, then group them all to get this tower.

You can do the same thing with the crane derricks, except they will be even easier since they aren't pyramid shaped (all the diagonals are the same angle, etc).

This looks like it could be a real time saver. Thanks, redneck. I'm going to give it a whirl and see how it goes. Nice tut. You should write them more often. John

Attached Link: http://www.employees.org/%7Eredneck/graphics/torus_tutorial.htm

I've only done one other tute, but it covers a lot of ground and may be useful for what you are trying to do. It's at the link above.

Very cool! I've never tried to use intersection much before. This method shows a lot of potential.

Whoops, oh by the way Boomer, that is a incredibly complex looking model you got going there. Excellent work, and I'll bet you had a blast doing it.

With something complicated and regular like that tower, I would probably have written a program in C++ to output the mesh. I started computing in an age when (all the students that used computers) were taught how to write programs.