Need some BAT advice (Cylinders and Cones)

[Damiangjy]

Hi guys, I need some advice on modelling in BAT with Cylinders and Cones.

What I'm trying to do is to make a cylinder that has 32 sides (excluding top and bottom), but have the general shape of having 16 sides.

Here's a picture of what I mean
http://www.jetphotos.net/viewphoto.php?id=6873760&nseq=16

As you can see, the main windows in the middle are separated from each other by thin walls that have their edges face outwards, however the general shape of the entire design is that of a 16 sided cylinder/ cone. I need to find a way that can let me control alternate edges of the cylinder/ cone so that I can make the outward facing plane of the thin separating wall.

Anyway here's another picture, or rather, a quick drawing of what I mean, except that this picture's 'general shape' has 8 sides. I need a 'general shape' of 16 sides. The concept should be the same.



As can be seen from the first picture from the link above, the walls separating the main windows are slanted down, hence I would need to know if this is possible to be done on a cone as well. I know one way would be to create boxes then duplicate them and rotate them at angles until I get the desired shape, but is there a more direct, straightforward way? The duplicating method may mean quite some tedious work scaling them to the right sizes.


Oh, and can someone tell me what's the difference between creating a spline and creating a normal 'primitive'. Many of the BAT tutorials I've seen so far involve making splines rather than primitives.

[cogeo]

Well, this specific model is quite hard to make, because of the viewing angle. You will rather need to make it much less slanted, if you want anything to be visible (otherwise the windows won't be visible at all).

I think the easiest way to make the thin separating walls is, as you said, make a "shape" (closed spline), extrude it and rotate it (move it a little too, so that the extruded shape is centered in respect with both X and Y axes). And of course use the "Reference" mode for the rotation, and do not collapse to mesh (at least before you are done), so that changes are easy.

Primitives are 3D objects, while shapes (splines) are 2D. An extruded spline becomes 3D.

[Girafe]

Ok I find the way not so difficult.

You create a cylinder with 16 faces and don't check smooth option.

Convert to edit poly the cylinder

Take edge selection

Select the edge like this:


Apply a chamfer value 0.1 or 0.2 or what you want.

Now you can extrude or bevel (it's better for the object you want to model) the faces you want.

[Damiangjy]

Thanks guys! Btw, if I use the duplication method, will there be errors if the objects overlap each other? From my experience in Valve Hammer Editor (teh hammre),  overlappinng would cause unnecessary slicing and carving resulting in huge polygon counts and more or less a screwed rendering...

[cogeo]

Not really! First off, how will you have "huge polygon count"? And even if you do, this may only affect the export times. The ingame performance is determined by the LODshell, as this is the actual 3D object at runtime (everything is "projected" on the LODshell faces). And "screwed rendering" may be the outcome of using textures of extremely high resolution. Take a look into this thread for more information.