Full disclosure: I’m a noob (got Blender about a week ago, have never done any CGI before, and only joined the forums this morning), so I apologize if this question has been asked before.
I’m in the process of making a starship, and a central component of the ship is the structural spine. The spine is going to be either an octet truss (example here)…
…or another type of space frame (I don’t know what this type is called).
Now, I realize that the truss is composed of a repeating pattern, and that to make it really long, I can make one segment (one of the octahedrons for the octet truss, for instance) and duplicate it as many times as needed. No, my problem is going to seem much, much sillier to you guys.
Both types of truss are composed of four long, parallel cylinders and a bunch of shorter ones that connect them to each other. Now, it was easy enough for me to make the four longer cylinders, and it was also easy to make the connectors that are perpendicular to the long ones (create a cylinder, rotate it 45 degrees on the y-axis and translate it into position), but many of the connectors are diagonal to the long cylinders, such as the connectors that define the octahedrons in the octet truss. That’s the embarrassing part.
I can’t figure out how to do the diagonal connectors.
I’ve tried rotating the would-be connector 45 degrees on the y-axis and then rotating it on the z-axis, but I found that when I did that, it was no longer in the right position on the y-axis, and fixing that meant it was no longer in the right position on the z-axis, and so on and so forth.
I thought maybe rotating it freehand would solve the problem, but that just left me flailing around like an idiot.
TL;DR, does anyone here know an easier way of making those diagonal connectors?