Does anyone have an idea on how to do this?
Yes, don’t do it. Boycot anything olympic till China pays for it’s atrocities to Tibet.
Atom: It’s not kookaburra’s fault that the unique and beautiful peice of architecture he wants to recreate happens to be Chinese. Also boycotting is a business practice involving money, and I don’t see anyone paying for this.
Kookaburra:You could do it two ways—well, you could do it three but one way is unspeakably tedious and horrifying.
The tedious, horrifying way would be to poly-model the bird’s nest by hand, extruding boxes, bevelling, sub-surfacing. Grunt work at it’s worst.
The tedious, less horrifying way would be to do roughly the same thing, except with curves. Making a profile of the ‘bird’s nest’ beam and then using it as a bevel object on a bunch of curves. Neither of the previous ways totally ensures that the framework pieces will line up with each other or be uniformly curved, unless you are insanely careful.
The third way which may be still fairly tedious would be to create a huge sheet out of beams, all flat along the ground, with the circumference of the birds nest as its length (vs. its height, I mean). Then bending into a cylinder, and then bending it into the bird’s nest shape itself via a series of lattice modifiers. It would certainly ensure uniformity, because when making the undeformed sheet you would never have to vary outside of one plane to make it. So all the peices would be level.
You’d have to be careful, when bending the lattices, not to change the distance between the control points very much, or else you might stretch the sheet out of shape, but if you’re careful it should hopefully turn out pretty well—I’m assuming. I mean I’ve never actually done this so it could turn out a disaster. XD
Anyway, good luck with your venture, hope it turns out well.
Wow, I had never seen the thing before, so I looked it up…what a strange design! Once again, genius and lunacy are closely tied.
I would use like a nubs donut, and then texture it with a picture of the real thing.
Maybe a simpler way: Model the global shape of the bird’s nest. Then use retopo to make the all the “beams/twigs” stick onto the surface.
Find the model on google earth(sketchup)…ok here it is…
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=5960eab630d7ac724eea8ee5766705e3
import it into blender…and improve away!
Here’s a tut on getting the model into blender