building sphere's

Has anyone found a nice way to make a sphere without it looking like total ass? I mean, i suppose saucers fall into a similar category but with them I always found if you build it bigger the better it looked. I stumbled upon an interesting design thought for a mothership I though I'd try out, but at its center its primarily a sphere for like 2/3rds of the ship.

 

There were some 'sphere' building layouts for Minecraft that looked OK ... but again, as you already know, they will be stepped and blocky. The bigger you build it....the better it looks until you get up close. My approach would be to make it big and to decorate the exterior with functional blocks so it doesn't look like it was supposed to be a perfect sphere.

I use this:
https://www.plotz.co.uk/minecraft-sphere-generator.php

Slider on the bottom gives you the size...slider on the right lets you step through layer by layer to build the sphere.

 

Look at it this way: constructing spheres, discs, and other assorted curves in a building block game handles most of the greebling for you!

 

Unlike vanilla Minecraft, this game actually comes with slopes. And there's even variants on those slopes.

 

I built a small/mid sized sphere recently, with smooth surfaces. Obviously it's just an approximation of a sphere, but I was quite happy with it. Unfortunately my appdata folder got obliterated yesterday due to some weird Windows issue, so I lost all of my saves and blueprints. But I'll rebuild it soon.

This is the only image I found about it:
https://postimg.org/image/mqv21mmcd/

The way I planned the sphere is that the very center would accommodate a hydrogen tank, with conveyors leading to the six sides of the ship to power hydrogen thrusters.

(On this picture I was working on getting the bottom to open up nicely to serve as an elevator. I was also thinking about making the left and right sides openable, to hide/show some rocket launchers, and to add retractable landing gears. But I had too many problems with the landing gears due to the fact that: a) the landing gears need 1 block clearance in both long sides to avoid block damage, and b) the fully retracted piston is more than 2 blocks long, so I'd have needed +1 block for clearance there too, which would have actually necessitated the use of two connected pistons to get the desired retraction length. Overall it would have wasted too much internal space. And I'd have had to come up with a different thruster placement too.)

 

The closest you will get to a sphere is flat going to 2x1 slope (30°) to triangle (45°) to 2x1 slope in opposition (60°) to flat for the ring. It actually looks nice except we don't necessarily have all the corner pieces to finish it (we might, but I'm not near a computer to test it).

 

Rotors and Grinders are your friends on this one, mate. Those or Plotz. The smaller the spere the easier to use; discs don't really have a limit. All you need to do is build a plane (or a cube for a sphere, though with spheres you'll have to constantly delete blocks to prevent the mechanism from getting cought up) with a Rotor in the middle; extend one, two or four arms with the length of your construct's radius (i recommend using 2 tops for really big projects; Rotors have a bit of a habit to break when the load on them is too big) and a couple of Grinder at the end. Don't use the Rotor's own rotation; it tends to break the connection between Rotor and Rotor-Head; use Thrusers on Override.

 

yeah Rotal, I think the rotor trick ends up being the "easiest" to some degree. At least you dont have to sit an count etc. I have not given it much thought though yet as I do not know how large I would need the overall ship yet and I've been a good boy and started working on an older incomplete ship of mine.

Also, another ship I wanna try building is a Hulk from Eve using the beam drill mod. I've seen a couple really good ones. It makes a nice medium sized large grid ship.

 

I use MS Paint and zoom in to 800% after making a circle with the dimensions I want. Then I color every other pixel a different color so I can easily count them. I make the circle in game and then flip the the next axis and do it again to make the outline of the sphere. You will want to make the side as 'tall' as it is 'wide' on the other axis you're currently on. So say the edge of the circle on the cardinal side is 7 pixels long. That layer will need to be that wide as well.

Really helps to do mirroring if in creative. If in survival.. well that's gonna be interesting. For structural integrity (not in the ME sense, but in case you bump something) use the 'attaching' points where pixels are diagonal to one another off the cardinal points, on the inside. This way I can focus on slopes on the outside to smooth it out.

Getting 'perfect' spheres is only possible at certain sizes which can be a bit limiting.

 

I find making satisfactory spheres in space engineers very difficult due to the lack of many peices to complete them. I can get the circles looking sort of acceptable but joining them is hard.

So much easier to do spheres in minecraft, you expect it to be all blocky and pixellated so you don't mind. But in Space Engineers I use the slopes a lot to get curvey shapes so a blocky sphere looks like a peice of junk only worthy (and still questionably worth it) of being used for target practice.

 

Making a sphere blueprint programmatically is easy though. All this counting blocks and rotor tricks are superfluous if you can make a perfect sphere blueprint FILE.

NB: When i say easy, it doesn't mean it's quick to develop that tool itself. But the blueprints are simple XML files and you can generate one with just blocks the same way you can generate a volumetric sphere.

 

I think before they make any new features, filling in the gaps in block shapes would be really nice. Don't get me wrong I really want new stuff but having more choices for slopes besides 1 to 1 and 2 to 1 would be amazing along with all the corner pieces and transitions to go along with them, and not just the ones we have now but all the ones that come in the half block "slab" transition slopes mod.

Then some more rounded blocks, the current 2 block diameter is useless, we need 3 block diameter so we can make a cylinder around a 1x1 functional block structure and then of course a 5 block diameter so we can make a cylinder around the hydrogen tank and make proper round rockets. The current modded blocks I mentioned above are not actualy armor and don't deform so they don't match up to the other blocks we have. There is a circular block mod but it also does not deform and only has diameters much larger. Along with those circular blocks we need connical blocks to make nose cones for our rockets. The round blocks really make sense as currently almost all spacecraft are cylindrical. It is a very usefull shape for spacecraft. And of course spherical blocks as the OP has suggested in various diameters to fit around existing functional blocks.

Our current armor block shapes seem like a "lets just start with these" type of selection that really needs to be filled in so we can really get creative and fucntional with our ship designs.

I think more armor shapes as described above and maybe armor panels or "thin wall" blocks would really set off a wave of newly designed ships and fresh creative and practical ideas about ship design that would add a lot more hours of fun gameplay.

Right now when I look at spacecraft art for ideas I have to disqualify a lot of ships because we are so limited in what shapes and lines we can create with our skimpy selection of block shapes.

 

Yes, we'd definitely need more shapes. I remember how disappointed I was when I found out that I can't even connect two sloped surfaces to each other. On the other hand, I don't know how Keen could implement a very long block list in a nice way - after some point the list can look ridiculous and be quite unwieldy.

If the building system wouldn't be strictly cube grid based, it wouldn't need nearly as many different block types to construct basic shapes; e.g. all sloped walls could be just normal armor blocks, connected in an angle with a single angled edge. But as far as I know no games provide a complex enough non-cube grid based building system.

 

It'd be really nice if we could have an armor block which snapped its edges to that of neighboring blocks and kept as flat a surface as possible while doing so. Weird looking corner intersection? Put one of those in!

 

Use Plotz make a perfect sphere and cover it in windows... done that

At the end the Render was constantly overloaded.
Edit: those pic's looked smaller when I preview'd the post, didnt want them to be so big, could someone teach me how to properly resize them? because I fail every time.​

 

They scale to 100% of the available space anyways. It's not like (normal) people would complain.

 

There were some 'sphere' building layouts for Minecraft that looked OK ... but again, as you already know, they will be stepped and blocky. The bigger you build it....the better it looks until you get up close. My approach would be to make it big and to decorate the exterior with functional blocks so it doesn't look like it was supposed to be a perfect sphere.

I use this:
https://www.minecraftcirclegenerator.com

 

Wow, talk about a blast from the past!

 

This was before my time on this forum. I'd have said something like "But you need two spheres to make it look like total ass"

 

There were some 'sphere' building layouts for Minecraft that looked OK ... but again, as you already know, they will be stepped and blocky. The bigger you build it....the better it looks until you get up close. My approach would be to make it big and to decorate the exterior with functional blocks so it doesn't look like it was supposed to be a perfect sphere.

I use this:
https://www.minecraftcircle.com

Slider on the bottom gives you the size...slider on the right lets you step through layer by layer to build the sphere.

 

There is also https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=338404695

If it no longer works it should be easy enough to fix let me know and I will give it a shot on making it work again.
I haven't had a use for using it lately.