Today we are going to take a look at how to
create something like this. We will start from the ground up: modeling
our base shape, enriching it with a few ornaments and eventually creating complex composite
structures. Stay then tuned until the end, enjoy the video,
give it a like and subscribe to the channel for further content. Press SHIFT-A and add a circle, change the
number of vertices to 16 as that's going to be enough. TAB into EDIT mode and press F to fill the
shape and then I to inset. Hit B for box selecting the lower half, X
and delete the selected faces. To avoid repeating the same operations on
all sides, I'm deleting half of the mesh and using instead a mirror modifier on both the
X e Y axis. Make sure the clipping option is ticked, otherwise
overlaying vertices will not merge. Now ALT click to select the lower edge loop
and E to extrude it on the Y axis untill it clips with its mirrored part. At this point you can easily define the thickness
of the arch just by moving the mesh on the Y axis according to what your specific need
is. Let's move on by adding an additional edge
loop to our curvature with CTRL-R; in this way we can manipulate the top vertices without
disrupting what we modeled so far. Indeed, let's select the top edge and press
S-Z and 0 to make it straight. By activating the snapping tool with vertex
mode on, we can select a single vertex, move it along the relevant axis and hover the mouse
over the vertex we want to align it to. By taking a look at what we have so far, we
can see that the curved part of our mesh is a bit jagged since we do not have a lot of
geometry. This could be fine depending on what your
final goal is, in my case since I'd like it to be smoother, I'm adding a subdivision modifier. We now have a smoother curvature, but we need
to make our edges nice and sharp again. To do that, we could either manually add support
loops, which is destructive, or we can do that non destructively by using a bevel modifier. Let's place it above the subdiv modifier,
reduce the distance and make it two new segments for each affected edge. I'll leave the mesh like this, since I'm going
to model something specific for the top part while the side will be taken care of by the
array modifier later on. If those rounded corners bother you, you can
just select the corresponding edges and crease them to the max. Let's now work on the profile of our curvature. Select the face loop and E to extrude it on
the Y axis. Be aware that everytime you extrude you're
creating new geometry, and while that is generally fine we want to remove this new faces at the
bottom since they will not be visible anyway and since having a clean outline on our mesh
will make it much easier to unwrap at a later stage. I'm then proceding to extrude in and out with
the same principles several sections of the arch with the main goal of creating loops
to be used later on for the placement of our embellishments. It's now time to work on the "impost" of our
structure. To model such profiles, you can either use
your imagination or leverage upon references such as this one I found on Pinterest. Now, when I model this kind of stuff I prefer
to start from a simple cube, without touching any of its dimensions, since it is the easier
way to ensure that all of our manipulations are uniform along all sides. Once placed into position, the groove is actually
pretty simple: hit E to extrude, right click to cancel and S to scale. Everytime you need to match a curvature just
ALT click select the relevant edge and press CTRL B to bevel it. Remember that you can always double tap G
to slide the edge into position if needed. Once finished, I'm adding a subsurf modifier
and a bevel modifier this time changing the method to "weight" and manually tweaking the
bevel weight for each edge in the side panel. Once again, I'm going to use a mirror modifier
on both the X and Y axis. Make sure that the side of the impost is ending
right where the arch is as to avoid problems with the array modifier later on. Sooner or later you need to decide which scale
to use. Especially in bigger projects, not using a
uniform scale would make it problematic to establish the correct proportions among the
different meshes. I'm going to use a real-world scale, and as
a good rule of thumb we know that the height of an arch can be defined as 4 times the radius
of its original circumference. Take this edge end extrude it on the X axis
until it clips. Let's activate the edge length option in the
overlays menu, select everything, TAB into edit mod and change the pivot point to the
3D cursor. At this point, just scale everything until
you reach the desired measurement for your radius, which in my case is 2 meters. We can now add a circle and scale it until
it matches the circumference of our arch, then duplicate it and move it down. The lowest point is indicating where the floor
should be. It is this now time to create the base of
our structure as displayed in the reference image. For the basement I will follow the same principles
used in modeling the impost. This time though I'm going a bit more freestyle
with its profile. For the column I'm using a reference as well. To model the flutes just select everything
and press I twice to inset individual faces and extrude inward along the normals. Add a subdivision modifier and play with edge
loops to achieve the desired result. Crease the edges sorrounding the flutes for
a sharper result. Moving on to the top of our mesh, my goal
is to model something like the displayed reference. With the base shape now in place, it is time
to move to the fun part and add some embellishments. The first thing I want to do, is to decorate
our curvature with something like this. The idea here is to create space for our decorations
by selecting the curvature, insetting individual faces and deleting the resulting selection. But as you can see, the moment we inset our
faces, the smoothness in our curvature is gone. Let's then take a step further: select the
two face loops and press SHIFT D to duplicate and P to make it a separate object, this will
be our benchmark desidered curvature. Let's select all its loose edges and crease
them as we need it to have the exact same shape as the original one. We can now select our original curvature and
assign it to a vertex group. At this point we can proceed with insetting
and deleting the faces. Let's add a shrinkwrap modifier, target the
benchmark curvature and make it effective only on the curved part by selecting in the
modifier the vertex group we just created. Let's now isolate our curvature, select one
of these diagonal edges, then from the menu select similar and length to get them all
at once. We can now crease them to the max and we're
done. We can now create our single decorations (which
in this case I guess are called "rosettes") by simply modeling over a reference. Once finished we need to place our decorations
along the curvature of the arch, the idea here is to use an array modifier along with
a curve modifier. To create our guide, let's take the benchmark
curvature mesh and run an edge loop through it. SHIFT-D to duplicate it and P to make it a
separate object. We can now delete the edge loop from the mesh,
select the new edge loop and convert it to a curve. Now it is just a matter of finding the right
scale and positioning for the rosettes. For the arch itself I want to create a few
patterns along the lines of the displayed reference. Once modeled, the placement for each pattern
will just follow the same principles used for the rosettes. Just repeat the process for all the patterns
you wish to create. As you can see, here I'm using the classical
egg and dart decorations also for the top of the columns. In this case, add an empty at the center of
the column (and make sure the origin point of your deco is there as well), then use it
as an offset in the array modifier applied to your decoration. I then used it again to embellish the top
part of the arch. Here it is important that you try to place
your decorations as to ensure that they would in any case tile correctly when used along
with an array modifier. Lastly, I'm giving a bit of additional details
also to the impost I'm then proceeding to finalize the top part with a few more embellishments. Now that we have all of our pieces in place,
let's take a look at how we can use our mesh into bigger structures. The first one would be the classical columnade,
pretty straightforward as it is just a stright array of single iterations. Let's start from our arch and give it an array
modifier. Everything seems messed up, and that's because
we need to apply the same modifier also to our benchmark curvature which is functioning
as a target for the shrinkwrap modifier. But to make it work properly we need our benchmark
curvature and our main mesh to share the same boundaries. A simple trick to do that would be to take
one of the edges, or even one vertex, and align it with the top far left and right geometry
of the arch. Of course, the iterations of both array modifiers
need to be the same. We could use the process also for our decorations,
but here we are instead going to use instances as to reduce the overall final number of polygons. But before doing that, I'm rearranging some
of the embellishments to avoid potential merging problems. Instead of having cut-outs, I'll use the full
model on the left and none on the right. When placed aside, multiple instances should
then look fine. Add a plane and make sure it has the exact
same width of the arch. Place it into the decoration collection and
make it the parent of all of the embellishments. Now in the object property tab, under instancing
select "on faces". At this point you can simply use an array
modifier on it and you will have everything placed correctly free of charges for your
system. The second type of structure we will take
a look at is the Dome. For this one, we will not use the top part. Take all you top decorations, move them into
a different collection and disable it. Let's then apply our mirror modifiers, select
all our meshes and move them along the Y axis in edit mode. Let's now add an empty to the center of the
world, add a mirror modifier on both the X and Y axis, target the new empty and rotate
it on the Z axis by 45 degrees. For the plane holding the decorations, you'll
need to apply the modifier and rotate by 90 degrees the side faces. Let's now apply the mirror modifier on the
arch and let's connect the different profiles with 3 faces for each side. Then, run an edge loop in the middle. Add a circle and give it 16 vertices and place
it into position. It is very important that you check your normals
here and make sure that they are coherent with the rest of the geometry. Now connect the circle with the rest of the
mesh. We're almost there, but we need to solve some
smoothness issues. Let's change the gizmo to "normal", activate
the snapping tool and align the vertices which are off of the curvature. To add the dome, let's take a sphere, again
with 16 vertices and cut it in half. Check you normals and connect it to the rest
of the mesh. And that should be all. I hope you found this helpful, if you did
hit the subscribe button and give this video a like. Thanks for watching and see you next time.
