This is project that I'm currently working on for fun. I saw a picture of the first Saltair dance and bathing pavilion on Shorpy's Historical picture archive site, and decided it would make a challenging and fun project.

The original Moorish-inspired structure, and its cresent-shaped piers stood on 2500 pilings located 4000 ft from the Eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake, and was reached by a long railroad trestle.
   There are no blueprints, drawings or elevations known to still exist, but I was able to find quite a few pictures via web searching that are making it possible to figure out proportions and scale.
   
I must say that I'm very happy with Carrara's renderer; though I've modeled this with mostly quads and some tri's,(using Wings) I know there are a few "N-gons" still lurking in the mesh. But Carrara doesn't seem to care, as long as all the polys are planar. I've read on various boards that a lot of Arch-VIZ guys use, and depend on N-gons and (shudder) booleans to make their Building and structure models. Does using an occasional N-gon make me a bad person? Do any of you guys stoop to using them?

 looks pretty cool

Thanks Thomllama.

 Tidy work!

Thank you Mark.

 Hya   50parecs,

grand to see  someone working on a good project. Nice texture work too. Bumpmaps?
Or new normal maps   from c8?

I have no idea what n-gons and planars are, but I like it. :)

 impressive details. great!

Hello Headwax, and thank you. Actually, I've only used bumpmaps here because the details tend to be very close to the surface, or inset and most angles I would render at would not betray the bumpmap relief as not being actual 3D. If I decide to zoom in for a closer shot I might go ahead and convert my bumps into normal maps with CrazyBump or xNormal, or somesuch. I'm really excited that Carrara8 is incorporating normal maps into its core functionality. I haven't tried painting any normal maps within Carrara yet.
  Thank you Analog. As I understand it, an n gon is a polygon with any number of sides more than 4.
Of course 4 sides make a "quad", which is the ideal. I should have said co-planar, instead of "planar".
Co-planar just means polys that share the same flat surface.
Thank you Rexus.

 thanks 50parsecs, I hevn't played with the normal maps yet. Time, time, that's all we need.

Perfect, 50parsecs! Amazing work!

 just saw the comment on N gons - if they are coplanar won't carrara merge them if you ask it?
Personally I don't care ngons unless you are trying to model a curved surface -as you said - or keep the poly count down. Gee, if you do edge looping you  always get a few.

Thank you Noviski. :) Since I've UV'd some of the models I was a bit reluctant to try merging since it might mess up the mapping. I guess I could just use a duplicate file and see what happens.

That is some fancy work, looking pretty good!!!

Thank you Thelby. I decided to do a render test of one of the pavilion's 4 towers and a section of the wall. Glad I only have to make one good tower of this type, and then I can duplicate. I'm thinking that I can get away with using bump, normal, and alpha maps to replace a lot of polys in certain areas, especially if I try to animate.