Modeling a Minaret in Swift3D

This tutorial will teach how to model a minaret, which is one of the most distinctive features of Islamic architecture and an important element in the structure of a mosque. Fans of of Prince of Persia shall instantly recognise its shape.

This is a beginner tutorial, you will not be required to have extensive knowledge on how to use Swift3D to be able to follow this tutorial.

Quick UI highlight

Here is a screenshot of the user interface with the main parts of it highlighted for beginner users. If I mention a certain toolbar, you can look it up in this image if you do not know where it is.

Modeling the dome of the Minaret

We are going to use the Lathe Editor to model our minaret, click on the Lathe Editor tab on the Main Toolbar.

The Lathe Editor is a tool in Swift3D that lets you draw symmetrical cylindrical shapes by drawing a simple path that is rotated around an axis to result in a 3D model that appears in the Scene Editor. You can learn more about Lathe in this tutorial.

We are going to draw a path in the Lathe Editor to create the dome of our minaret. You will need to click on the Add Point Tool to start drawing.

The Lathe Editor will create the 3D dome when we supply a path that illustrates half the dome only. Draw a shape similar to the one below by making left-button clicks in the appropriate places.

I am sure that you noticed that the line we drew is not smooth at all. We are going to fix that now. I recommend that you zoom in at this stage using the Magnifying Glass icon located on the Main Toolbar, select that tool and then click on the scene. We'll now go back to our job, select the Shape Tool and then select the second point from the top of our path.

We will make this point part of a curve to make the path smoother, click on the Curve Point button in the Main Toolbar. This should make two more anchor points appear.

While the Shape Tool is still selected, click on one of the anchor points and drag it, you will notice that the path changes its shape. Try moving the anchor point around to get a smooth line that goes along the shape of the minaret. Do the same thing to the other points in our path.

Once you are satisfied with the smoothness of your path, you can click on the Scene Editor tab to view the 3D dome of your minaret.

Our dome is a little bit too big, we are going to scale it down. To do this, you will have to select the dome, and then click on the Scale Mode button located on the Main Toolbar.

When scaling objects in Swift3D it is good to hold the object from its boundaries. As you move the cursor towards the center of the object the object's size decreases and as you move the cursor further from the center of the object the size increases. Scale the dome down to the half its original size.

We will now move the dome to the upper part of the Front Viewport. To do this, you will have to click on the dome, and then when the axis sign appears, hold Shift on your keyboard to lock-on a single axis and then use the y-axis to move it upwards.

That should give us some space in the viewport to work on the shaft of our minaret. You should have the following in your viewports now.

The second part will be added tomorrow !!!!