Trying to Mirror 4 ways

Support Modeling
1

I am making a colonnade, and I am trying to reduce the vertex count on my columns which are rather complex. While the column is identical all the way around, the column capital (Part at the top of the barrel) is more complex. While the barrel is round and therefore has “infinite sides” The capital has essentially 4 sides. Each side is mirrored, left to right.

What I need to do is mirror each half face on the x and y, then mirror the mirrored (Like an array) but rotated 90 degrees. Like this

Original column segment:

image
image738×512 4.15 KB

Mirrored x and y :
image

Mirrored again and rotated, (Only duplicated here to show what I mean):
image

Then after all that, I need to plug this complex mirrored column into an array again to create the colonnade. ( have seen using an empty for rotation, but I can’t get that to work with this final step.)

Then arrayed (Shown here with just the xy mirror.):

image
image888×580 30.4 KB

This is one of MANY colonnades on this project, so I need to get the vertex count low as possible. Especially since the model is already over 15 million verts, and just over half done. My computer is only 2 years old, and struggling.

Is this just not possible in Blender? If it is, what do I need to do to get this to work?

(I will be away from my computer for a while, my apologies if it takes a while to respond.

2

You can use Mirror modifier with custom controller(for pivotting) along with the array modifier, you can add many of those on top of eachother.

See the image and I am providing the Blender file for you

blender_E757R9R9AA
blender_E757R9R9AA.png1968×1138 139 KB

columns.blend (98.7 KB)

3

I had tried this before, and it did not work. Then I realized that it was because I was rotating the empty 90 degrees. For some reason, this was rotating the second mirror 180.

So I rotated the mirror 45 instead, and my second mirror rotated 90. For some reason, it’s multiplying the rotation of the empty by 2! That’s okay with me though, I have it working now! I’m already down from 15.9 million vertices to 12.25, and I have only begun to simplify and mirror the various colonnades.

Thank you for your help! Without your blend file, I would not have given the empty rotation another look!

4

I am glad I was helpful