Domes the Easy Way


Author: IRN_Razor_CORE

When I first read the Creating a Dome in JED tutorial made by Mangore Kiramin I thought, "wow, this is really awesome!"
However, lazy as I am, I started trying to find an easier way, and one day it clicked. Just like Mangore, I was just playing around in JED trying to figure it out, here is what I found:

First you need to make a polygon. Personally, I use the freesector plugin (lazy as I am) but you can also do it manually (see Perfect Polygon tutorial made by Brian Lozier).

How many sides it has doesn't matter, it doesn't even have to be a polygon.
This is what I started with:

easy.gif (11401 bytes)

1. Now first change your sector flags to preview as 3do. This is done by selecting your sector and pressing enter, then double click on +Flags and check preview as 3do. Now rotate your sector a bit (shift+arrows) and choose surface mode by pressing F or clicking on the surface icon. Select the top surface of the polygon.

easy1.gif (11355 bytes)

2. Now extrude that surface. Now select the top of surface of the new sector.

easy2.gif (11796 bytes)

3. Now extrude that surface. Then switch to sector mode by pressing S or clicking on the sector icon.
Select the top sector. It should look like in the picture below now:

easy3.gif (12291 bytes)

4. Now switch to side view by pressing shift+2. Press F9 to bring up the Tools Window. Change Scale Factor to 0.9 and Delta Z to -0.1. Now press translate a couple of times this depends on how big your polygon is. Now press scale once. Now switch to surface mode (or do it in 3D Preview) and select the top surface of the top sector and extrude it. The switch to sector mode and select the new sector. If you didn't use 3D Preview you probably need to switch to side view (shift+2).

easy5.gif (4335 bytes)

5. Hopefully it looks like this now. Now press F9 and translate the same or more times than before. Now scale it twice.
After scaling it you might want to adjust the height a bit by pressing translate again. This is how mine looked at this stage:

easy6.gif (4144 bytes)

6. Now switch to surface mode and select the top surface again and extrude it then select the new sector and translate and scale it (about 5 times).

7. Repeat step 6 but scale it much more so it looks something like this:

easy7.gif (5341 bytes)

8. Now simply delete that sector and then press F12. Now go to your walkplayer and when you get to it look straight up.
Click once on the surface you are looking at. Now click beside the 3D Preview window and then press M. Now press F12 once more and select the next surface your looking at and click beside the window once more and press M. Repeat this till you can't see any more surfaces and it's all black.

9. What now? Well your done with your dome, I guess it's now where you send me some cash as a thank you gift :)