Modelling Question for tent-like shelter panels

[pentexplorer]

Hi there, would like to ask how to model a shelter that sort of shapes like a starfish or you can say a shorter smooth-like tent..I have provided pictures what I have done but that was just a quick fix and what I have thought that works best and fastest. Its just merely tracing the outline with a spline then extruding 1m for the windows part and then converting to editable poly where I scale the windows a bit back in (like a curve in window shape) and also extrude a bit more higher for the next scale down to the center point where all the vertices sort of collides together to form the tent like shape but this makes the wireframe and the smoothing of the shape quite bad and there are some defects in fact as well as the distinctive 3 lines that connect to the center point. The client did say he would not like to see those 3 lines so he wants it to be smoothen out. I hope I sort of get the message to you and I think the pictures will demonstrate a much more clearer understanding. Perhaps using spline + surface modifier would do the trick? Thanks and hope I get an answer

[Claudio Branch]

All you need to do is create an arc and rotate it about an axis. Attach all of these together and weld them together and then convert to Editable Spline.

 

If you like, add a Shell modifier.

[Peter M. Gruhn]

What I did is :

 

- create an n-gon with three sides

- convert to poly

- turn subdiv on (or use turbosmooth)

- select outer edges and connect

- select mid-edge vertices and scale in and lift up

 

I found it easy to adjust the height and shape of arc by manipulating those edge vertices per the last step there. I'm also on a bit of a poly-modelling kick right now. Notice that on the skinny one it starts to show that there is a ridge line running from the ground to the top. Guess that's always there but normally broad enough that it doesn't show.

[Iain Denby]

I haven't tried it, but would have thought a spline cage and surface modifier would do the trick nicely.

[pentexplorer]

thanks for the tips and helping out guys...you will always learn something new here. In the end, I went with Peters way, though the shape wasnt as simplistic as a n-gon so I had to add more vertices to the line after getting the center triangle from the ngon and reshape according to the drawings. Guess a lot of tweaking here and there.