Hi. I've been trying to do some spaceships in rhino. The regular sphere can be converted into decreasing rectangles by making it a mesh. I've made this better by redrawing from surfaces point to point to create triangles but the bottom triangles are still way bigger than the top. Does anyone know where I can find a formula to generate X,Y,Z points for a buckeyball? I could input the points and play connect the dots.

Give this site a look lots of rhino tutorials- http://perso.wanadoo.fr/3d/rhino/3dmmcneel.html this is the link for the buckyball tut. ftp://ftp.mcneel.com/pub/rhino/models/buckyball.3dm

Try making a dodehadron or icosohedron and perform smooth subdividing (not sure for the exact command for Rhino) his will give you the wireframe of a geodesic sphere Some 3D programs can take the wireframe and build a object arround it- I know MAX and cinema 4D version 8 can. Much easier than connecting the dots

This may be a variation of what Lord Nakagawa mentioned above... a standard 500mm lightwave globe (24 sections, 12 segments) with the bottom flattened (stretched) to make the floor. the "dome" polys are then bevelled (10mm offset, 10mm shift) and assigned a separate material (glass in this case)

Attached Link: http://www.applied-synergetics.com/ashp/

Unfortunately, Rhino is a nurbs modeler. When it converts to meshes it does a polar division into squares that get smaller towards the north and south poles of the sphere. There is the ability to generate a mesh sphere but it always has 1800 polys. I have found a neat little program called WinDome for generating geodesic domes, either surfaces or wireframes. It will generate class 1 or 2 domes with Ichosahedral, tetrahedral, or octahedral structure. It will do true spheres, eliptical or parabolic domes. Output is in dxf vrml pov or ascii 3 cordinate points.