Rhino tutorial: Creating 3D Objects
Water tower
In Rhino tutorial: Creating 2D Objects you have made the profile of a water tower. In this tutorial we will make this water tower 3D and add some (architectural) details.Open the file you have saved earlier or download it here if you have lost it.
Lets make the water tower 3D by revolving the profile.
- Select the profile of the water tower and in the menu go to Surface > Revolve
- Select the bottom end and the upper end of the profile
- Click FullCircle in the command line . The profile will be revolved 360 degrees
Start adding some details. Since not all the commands are discussed use Help > Command Help... for assistance.
Let's make some vertical grooves on the foot of the tower below the basin.
- Since the surface is revolved it has edges on its start and end point. You will use one edge from the foot to create a curve.
Use Curvs > Curve From Objects > Duplicate Edge and select the edge
- Use Solid > Pipe to make a surface on the foot of the tower.
- Use Transform > Array > Polar to make copies of the pipe around the center of the tower
- Use Solid > Difference to remove the pipes from the foot. As a result you should get a water tower with vertical grooves in the foot.
However you might get an error Boolean difference failed. in the command line. There are known limitations to boolean operations.- Normals do not point the way you expected
- Control points of objects are on the same place
- Objects have surfaces on the same place
Basically there are two ways to solve problems with boolean operations. The easy way and the hard way.
The easy way
The most easy way is to move an object a little to prevent objects sharing the same control point and/or surface.
- Continue from point 2 after the creation of the pipe.
- Use in the front view Transform > Move to move the pipe a little bit downward like 0.01 or even less.
- Continue from point 3 and make the grooves in the foot of the water tower.
The hard way
Boolean operations are actually a combination of several Rhino commands like Explode, Intersect, Trim and Join. Because of the complexity you need to organise your model.
- Again continue from point 2 after the creation of the pipe
- Delete the curves as we don't need them anymore.
- Select the pipe and change its layer
- Select the tower and the pipe and explode both
- Turn off the layer of the pipe
- Select the basin of the tower, change its layer and turn it off. Only the foot remains
- Turn on the layer of the pipe
- Study closely the intersections of the surfaces
- Create a new layer and make it current or set an unused layer current.
Created intersection curves will be put in this current layer
- Select two intersecting faces and use Curve > Curve From Objects > Intersection to create curves on the intersections.
Continue with these steps till all needed curves are made on other intersecting faces. If done correctly there should be no gaps between the curves. Therefore you could join the curves to a closed curve with Edit > Join
- Use Edit > Trim and/or Edit > Delete to remove the unwanted parts of the pipe and foot of the tower
- Make copies of the curves with Transform > Array > Polar and use these curves to trim the rest of the foot
- To finish make also copies of the trimmed pipe
