Hello everyone,
I’m modeling a gothic-style building in Blender. It’s a lot of fun and I’m learning a lot while I’m doing it, things just happen to be quite… slow at times. Yesterday, I attempted to do a window. Here’s my reference image:
… and here’s how it turned out for me (only the top part is interesting; the rest is rather trivial):
My process was:
- Create the protruding lines (the ones marked as sharp in the outcome image) by placing a vertex and extruding it time and time again, following the shape of the line, making sure to put them all on the same vertical plane.
- Behind the first plane, I did the same for the “inner” lines on another plane.
- I connected the resulting lines up with faces and fixed as many irregularities as I could.
- I only did half of the shape of course, and used a mirror modifier.
The pros of this approach:
- straight forward
- reasonably low-poly (whole model has about 1000 vertices, which I think is fine)
The cons:
- very time consuming, manual, braindead labour (the whole thing took me about 90 minutes)
- resulting geometry shows no sign of regularity whatsoever, nothing what e.g. a bezier curve would produce. There are imperfections due to manual arrangement of vertices. Line thickness varies etc.
I also watched this tutorial on YouTube which uses the curve modifier extensively; alas this approach doesn’t work when the tracery lines join and split a lot as in my reference image.
So… do you have any idea how to do this more efficiently? Gothic tracery is inherently mathematical in nature, so I suppose that there should be a mathematical / algorithmic way of creating it?