Creating a Steampunk Observatory Part 01: The Tower

(Base Mesh: MiaMaterial/Lambert Base Texture)

Here I will be talking about the making of the base mesh for my Steampunk Observatory tower, and going through step-by-step the different techniques I used to get to the basic block out of the building. It will be split into several parts: The Tower, The Dome Door Mechanism, The Houses and the Additional Detail (Telescope, cross beams, knuts and bolts etc).

Tutorial 01: How to build the Tower

Firstly, we're going to start with the dome. As an observatory, the dome has to be sturdy enough to be able to open and close to release the telescope, but not so heavy that it will crush the rest of the building. 

Having looked through the history books, I found many examples of copper domes throughout history, as it is light enough to stay on the top of the building, and is made of metal, can handle the added pressure of constant chafing from opening and closing the doors.

To get the basic shape of the dome create a sphere, select half of the faces (by right clicking over the object and selecting 'face') and delete them.

The left image is what the shape should look like all the way around. Then delete the top circle of polys. This serves two purposes: Getting rid of the edge heavy pole (The point all the edges meet) at the top of the sphere, and making room for the 'door opening' mechanism later on. 

Then we need to create the opening for the telescope. Select two columns of the sphere and use the 'Extrude' tool (marked with the red circle on the left hand image) to push those faces inwards. This creates an indented part of the sphere that will later be used to create the doors. The polys this extrude creates at the top and bottom can be deleted (as shown in the right hand picture).

Now we are going to create the top part of the door opening mechanism. Create a cylinder, and by going the polycylinder1 subheading of the Inputs folder (to the right of the screen, shown in left hand picture), you can find the 'Subdivisions Axis' tab. This tab allows you to increase or decrease the amount of edges you have around the cylinder. This is standard at 20, but 10 will do for this. Drop the subdivisions down to 10, and select the edge heavy poles at the top and bottom (holding right click on the object and selecting 'Edge' from the tab instead of 'Face'. 

The edges now have to be replaced. The object must always have quad (4-sided) shaped faces, though a tri (3-sided) can be used on the occasion. There are several ways to redraw the edges where you want them, but for this I used the 'Multicut' tool in the 'Modelling Toolkit'. The modelling toolkit is the first of a set of four buttons in the top right of the screen. Scoll down the tool palette that will pop up and find 'Multicut' (as shown in the picture). Then select the vertices you want to connect. I have drawn out a basic 'connect the dots' in the picture that will give you 6 quads. Do this for the top and the bottom and place it in the hole we made at the top of the dome earlier.

Next we're going to create the mechanism. By using the extrude tool, you can create a three tiered cylinder from the one we just created. To do this, select the top six faces of the shape. Using the extrude tool we used before, use the little cubes to scale inwards. By pressing the 'G' key on your keyboard you can redo this action. This means that now when you use the upwards arrow, you can pull up an entirely separate row of polys. Do this for every new direction you want the polys to go. For example, If you want to create the bottom tier of polys, you would scale inwards, press G, pull upwards, press G, pull inwards again etc. I will upload a video later to better show how this is done.

By using this extrude method again, you can make various ridges at the bottom of the dome, to show some form of 'fastening' to the rest of the tower. This will later be detailed with panels and large bolts.

Now we have our basic dome, we can go ahead and make the tower. Select the final edge loop at the base of the dome (double clicking one of the edges in question) and using the extrude tool again, you can pull out the entire tower down. 

Now, we don't want the tower actually attached to the dome, so we can do something to split it and make two separate objects. This is done using the extract tool. Select the faces you want to extract and go up to the 'Mesh' tab at the top. By clicking on the little square next to the extract button opens its settings. You want to make sure you have 'Separate faces' ticked. Then go ahead and click the Extract button. This will then have split your mesh into two parts as shown in the picture below.

Now we have the basic tower and dome, it's time to add some detail:

Using our good friend Extrude, you can create a foundation for the tower as shown above. Now, our tower looks quite basic, so to make it into a proper working observatory, we're going to add some little houses around the bottom and an upper walkway. I'll show you how to do these a little later.

This observatory is going to belong to my Pirate, so she can watch the sea and the skies before she goes flying in her flying Pirate Ship.