Hey guys! A few of you mentioned that you wanted a tutorial on how to make arches (or other geometry) curve around a cylinder.

Well, this is my first tutorial, and so if it ends up being confusing let me know and I can rewrite it. I took too many pictures, but I'm more of a visual learner.

Here goes.



Let me start off by stressing the importance of the grid. Any sort of modular assets (even curved or radial) MUST be confined to the grid or you will encounter frustrating complications while modeling and using your assets. The grid is designed to keep things clean and simple.

In fact, I use it so much, I gave the grid options it's own hotkey: ctrl+alt+g

You'll end up using this a lot, as you'll be changing the size of the grid often. Keep it to 5, 10, 20, 40, and so on.




We'll start off by making an arch. This is just one way of doing it, but you are free to make the arch in whatever way you feel. I have found that this works well with more complex molding.
And so we start with a box. This will become our archivolt (decorative band of arch) in a moment.



Make whatever shape you want, but be certain that the top and bottom of this shape are filled, flat, and have only 1 face. This will likely be an n-gon.





Copy it, move it a number of units over, rotate it and combine both shapes. Remember that the center of these shapes will end up getting cut in half, so have them 4, 8, or 16 units away center-to-center. (probably have it wrong in this image, please don't count it).




Select the top faces and go to Edit Mesh > Bridge (options) near the top.
Be sure to have smooth path+curve selected and enough divisions to give you something to work with. I haven't figured out just how it works, but putting one more division than what you want seems to keep it even (for example, I put in 17, one more than the usual 16).


This will give you something ugly like this:


But we'll fix that, by referencing from a cylinder. Match the size as close as you can. The radius will likely be 1 unit bigger than the typical 4 or 8 (like 5 or 9 or something).




go into an ortho view, and select the curve you see in the arch. You may need to right-click and select control vertex


Just mess with the top 2. Drag it up, and scale it sideways until it gets as close as you can make it.



Much better



Here's why we had you move your two initial shapes away from eachother center-to-center. We'll be cutting off the ends with booleans. MAKE SURE EVERYTHING IS SNAPPING TO THE GRID. Or I'll slap you. Srysly.


Merge any stray verts


But that's just an example of how to make a simple arch. I know you can make something more elegant and beautiful than that. So we won't be working with that bulky piece of garbage. This is much better.

That same arch, with booleans, can be made into a few variations.




Now we'll make our radial reference grid. Start with a cylinder that has 16 segments, and a radius of 4, or 8, or if you're feeling really ambitious, 16 or higher. Snap it to the center of your scene.


And another one. But this time, 128 segments around, and 16 segments on the caps.


Move your arch into position. It'll need to be rotate along Y exactly 11.25 degrees.
FREEZE TRANSFORMATIONS. Found in the Modify dropdown




We're going to create a lattice that will be our primary deformer to bend the arch around this curve.
In the animation menu, go to Create Deformers > Lattice (options)

No need for local mode, make it 9x2x2.
This makes it 8x1x1 segments.



Start snapping each lattice vertex from the top ortho to your radial grid that you made. The large 16 sided cylinder defines where the edges of your arch should go. The large 128 sided grid guide the verts in between.

Be careful. When snapping to vertexes, you must be sure to use the transform tool arrows. Otherwise, you will flatten your arch. Check in perspective view often to make sure you didn't screw it up.




One more thing. Even though it's curved, it's not quite matching up with the actual curvature of the cylinder. You'll need to move the lattice verts in the middle outward so the geometry of the arch matches up. Helps to do this in Object Transform mode in your tools options.




Let's take a look. OMG it's too tall!



Easy fix. Be sure to be using grid snapping throughout all this.



So you have one arch. Lets make an array of arches. Make sure you freeze the transformations of your first arch if you haven't already. Take note of these angles. You may use every one, or every other one, depending on the size of your arches.
You got this one. I don't have to tell you how to do everything.



Use a calculator if you need to. Keep adding 11.25



Then just duplicate your quadrant of arches, freeze transformations, and rotate again until you have a full circle.



There you have it! I forgot to note that you can delete the faces on the sides of the arches, so you can merge them seamlessly. If you did this right, you will be able to merge all the verts of each arch perfectly into one solid mesh.

You can create some very beautiful architecture using this method.





POST AND QUESTIONS YOU MAY HAVE HERE, and I will try to answer them

I'm totally remaking the arches for my Brawl scene now. Thanks!

Impressive tutorial, especially the images at the end... I don't use Maya though.

edit: haha, I've been editing the crap out of this post for some reason. But you replied to it so I guess I'm going to leave the last part there.

Awesome, thanks =)

trancerobot: This method can be easily adopted to Max or any other 3d software, no worries.

Those last images are renders from a school project I did last year. That project is where I developed this method.

tristamus: no problem, man!

Cool tut man, thanks for sharing. Interesting Bridge tool in Maya, I wish Softimage had something similar.

Excellent, thanks so much!

Cool stuff! Something i thought of, why not just use the bend modifier (or what ever it's called in maya) instead of the latice bending?

Anyhow, cool tut (:

The bend deformer can be weird to work with as you need to input radians and you also have to move pivot points around to keep it on the grid.

Thanks man!

Interesting method. Seems like a lot of steps?

I'm a max user and I normally I create a path/spline for the arch, create a shape path and sweep it over the arch. You can adjust either the shape and the default UV's that are generated work for most things really well.

You can also create a straight piece of geometry and path deform (WSM) it over the arch path/spline, I suggest doing it to an instance that way you can work on the straight piece while the curved one is updated as you work.

If that doesn't make sense I can kick up a few visual examples.

EDIT:

Dang, Mark! I'm sure there's something like that in Maya, just haven't found it yet. Any more experienced Maya users around here know how to do that?


sltrOlsson: I'm not familiar with the blender modifier, but I use the lattice because you can precisely snap the verts to the grid or other verts. This is what gave the arch it's precision.

Pretty similar in Maya:


set up your curves for the arch and the profile:



Go to Surfaces>Extrude>options with the curves selected (profile first):



If the tube/arch is inside out, you can rotate the profile curve or go to Curves>Reverse Curve Direction.
A node called nurbsTessellate has the value for the number of divisions (polygon count):



modifying either curve afterwards will affect the shape/profile of the arch:

nullfed> You beat me to it T_T

I like the Tesselation Method: General as well where you get to decide U and V spans.

Super Useful! Thanks, definitely keeping this in mind when I need to do some arch work!

nullfed: Awesome! I'm going to give that a shot! Thanks for taking the time to post that, man, I appreciate it.

Thanks very much for sharing all this, it's opened my eyes on how to do this.

another way to do it in maya is with a motion path and flow path object, which is usefull if you got something else than a profile.

very very helpful !

cool stuff! thanx for sharing!

Thanks for sharing the techniques guys. I made a video tutorial a while back on creating this sort of stuff in Maya. It's pretty rudimentary as I was just learning Maya at the time, and I'm sure there are better ways to go about it.

http://www.vimeo.com/10676401

There's an addendum in the comments worth reading.

Thanks Makkon!

Very nice. I loved that from this one tutorial 2 other where spawned. I"m going to try this later