I’m currently attempting to model a lighthouse, and I’m running into trouble with what I feel like should be very simple. Underneath the upper deck, multiple pieces of curved iron support the balcony. Most of my difficulty comes from connecting the inscribed circle to the rest of the arm. I have already tried modeling it with curves, planes, cubes, and probably a few more methods. I’d appreciate any help you could provide!
This is one of the reference drawings I’m using, the inscribed circle with three smaller circles above it is the area I’m talking about.
This is a close-up of the support. You can see the large inscribed circular portion in the top right. The point where it joins the rest of the support is where most of my difficulty is coming from.
Your ‘CBSL Brochure’ image is missing and by the way not the best ref.
you have to contruct it from a circle and a extrusion of the other lines, see here in lowpoly
The difficulty depends on how stringent your needs are. If this is a purely visual piece that won’t be viewed from very close up, then you can get away with a few things, like intersecting and overlapping geometry.
Here the main support frame and the inscribed circle are two seperate objects (curves with custom bevel curve objects, plus bevel modifier). They overlap (z-fight flicker in the viewport where they meet) and self-intersect (the frame has pinching/bulging artefacts at some corners), but as you can see it’s scarcely apparent.
Thank you for the excellent example and explanation! I’m always amazed by the amount of effort people will go through to help out and I really appreciate it.
