Creating a Steampunk Observatory Part 02: Creating the Dome Doors

Tutorial 02: The Dome Doors

In order to have a telescope sticking out of the top of the observatory, we're going to have to create some doors. 

This is how we left the dome in the last tutorial. We're now going to use the section we extruded inwards as the base for the doors. 

We'll start by selecting the faces and extracting them, like we extracted parts in the first tutorial.

Move the extracted faces out of the dome, and scale them up slightly to fit around the dome with a small gap. 

Next, we'll select the edges of the door and extrude them to meet the dome (Left). Then go up to the cap we made earlier and add an edge loop down the middle nearest to the doors (Right).

We now need to extract the cap into 3 separate parts: The Pole, and the two door attachments.

Select half of the door polys and extract those too (Below).

Select the top faces for the left hand door and pull them a little further out. This will help differentiate the two doors.

Now we can line up the doors to their respective cogs. To do this, select a vertex from the door, and while pressing 'V' pull it across to line up with the closest vertex on the cog. Do this for all four vertices. Line up the right hand door to the lower cog, and the left hand door to the upper cog.

Next, we need to extract the lower attachment from the dome. Select the faces of the top protrusion and extract it. The right hand door can now be lined up with the vertices on the lower cylinder too.

The left hand door still needs to attach to something at the bottom, so to create this, just duplicate the ring the right door attaches to and move it down slightly. 

Select the outer faces of the lower ring and scale them outwards to match up to the left hand door.

The idea of doing this is so that when we make the doors move, the two rings they are attached to will also move, making it look like the inner mechanism is moving to open them. 

So to attach them all up, select the top cog and the bottom ring to the left hand door, and the bottom cog and the top ring to the right hand door. This can be done by selecting them all and selecting 'Combine' under the 'Mesh' menu.

Lastly, to remind us that the dome is meant to be metal, we're going to apply a copper texture to it using the mental ray shader. Right click over the selected dome pieces, and go down to 'Assign New Materials'. in the search bar type 'Mia' and you should be able to see 'mia_material_x' to select. In the 'Attribute Editor' (that should pop up to the right of the screen when you click on the 'mia_material_x' button), you should see a button to the right of the sphere that says 'presets'. Click on this and select 'Copper'. The image below shows what this should look like. It will also make the test render of the opening doors look more interesting.

Next: Tutorial 03: Walkway and Foundations