Hi everyone. I’m new here. I’m wondering what the best way to model 3D roof beams is. For example if you want to make a simple gabled roof for a medieval house and you want to create the two wooden beams at the front of them that come off the left and right side of the roofs, but you want them to connect at a perfect triangle in the middle, what’s the best way to go about that? I found myself trying to move vertices around manually and align them to world origin and stuff like that and wondered if there was a better way to do it.
The way I did it did not come out very well unfortunately
If the triangular angle is the important factor, then I start with the triangle. Then use that as the basis to create the beams.
The alt approach, if you already have the beams, is to get trig involved (if needed) to determine the angle of the peak, then rotate the beams to match.
The math of all the above is simple, but cannot just be overlooked as “don’t like math, but need perfect angle result.”
(Or, just eyeball it as “close enough”, if you don’t need CAD/real-world accuracy here.)
Thanks for the advice. I really enjoy the math part. I try to learn the concepts behind stuff rather than just throwing myself at it and trying to shape things. The triangle is not necessarily the important part, but instead that they can connect in the middle like two faces that just come together. Then I am hoping to drop them in on top of another wall plane so they snap perfectly and then I can put roofs next to them
Other than i just did one can also copy edges and scale them at “the other point” to make them cross each other and then find the crossing vertex.
Another posibility:
Using the scaling “trick” above and then subdivide the edges can also be used with another “trick”: vertex slide ( GG ) while having snap on edges enabled to re-position the vertex on the crossing point.. (this actually was re-mentioned in the forum lately but i could find it..)
Another posibility:
When constructing from a triangle; just extrude downwards and then inset and delete the unwanted faces and extrude (not done here)..
Thank you so much for this simple solution. This really helped a lot! I didn’t even know about gg (slide). Just so easy and simple. idk why I didn’t think of this.
Out of all these, I think I really liked the triangle method but after fiddling with it, seemed to be that I couldn’t figure out how to make it work haha. I was making more of a mess for myself.
How does GG slide work by the way? I meant to ask that. I’ve never used it before and I’m kind of confused. Does it like move along the normal or something like that? Because I have troubles sometimes moving other stuff too and I haven’t figured out how to get it to work. Similar to roof beams, the little part of the roof beam that hangs off the side of the roof, for example if you want that longer, I’ve tried like a combination of shift x or shift y shift z etc to try and get it to go like exactly diagonal
You can also select more than one edge (even a face) but there are more restrictions of edge choice to slide along. It is still “edge slide” not face slide but it will slide all the selected edges.
