I thought I would re-post a mini-tute I posted in Boomer's oil platform thread. The technique I described in that thread works very well in building an 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. 2. 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. 3. 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). 4. 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. 5. 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. 6. 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).

Oh! I have got to try this. Thanks!

very good tip, thanks!

Very cool technique, one I've never seen!

cool technique

Very kewl, have to try it!

I gonna have to try this, redneck, because I'm sure it will sasve me some space with the file size and maybe make things easier for me from the technique I have in my head to model the derrick. Most likely, I will try both and see which one I like best. Awesome technique, btw.