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How to draft a 3D swimming pool


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I don't know of any tutorials, but I made this today after seeing your question and wanting to challenge myself.

Typically, I design a pool in plan and section and do not worry about modeling it.

However, these curves can be used to loft or revolve a surface and then use the reshape tool restricted on the Z axis to pull the shape into a desired form.

Alternatively, you can extrude solids and do subtractions/intersections and fillets to get what you need.  I would like to know a good method for doing this because mine was tedious and resulted in some geometry flaws that I couldn't fix.

Plus, I could not figure out how to develop the floor of the pool.

There's gotta be a better way.

 

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11 minutes ago, Mason2152 said:

@jeff prince that is beautiful work. I have pretty limited experience with 3D modeling and it is obvious I need a lot more practice.

 

I think the tricky thing for me is trying to figure out how to take a constructible plan and section and making it into an accurate model.  The contractor needs drawings with control points for layout.  These curvilinear pools are based on center points and tangent arcs, something I really struggle with drawing in VW, but came easily in AutoCAD.  I need VW practice too, hence my interest in your question.  Hopefully some of the real gurus here will chime in and give us a hand because the sample I made in VW does not lend itself to creating useful drawings for construction.

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These are the kinds of complicated shapes we are talking about modeling.  Nice, fluid curves, walls that have a fillet where they meet a curved floor which slopes to a drain.  I hope someone has some pointers on how to form these complicated surfaces.  The skatepark tutorial video just isn't enough...

pool-construction-2.thumb.jpg.b69b1301fda9d881fdebcb96dc75fafe.jpgsteel-construction.thumb.jpg.bab8429e416f2f5db6a33fbefe265048.jpgpool-construction-page-1.thumb.jpg.8e9efd7e673e85570e484b5a15a1b626.jpg39261a4d3db10cfd91a5308786d1b084.thumb.jpg.182674237b214cd620f3b5b5c0d32992.jpg

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42 minutes ago, Mason2152 said:

@jeff prince That is exactly what I'm looking at (in fact that looks a lot like my pool. I just get frustrated because of my lack of understanding with most of the program

 

Practice, practice, practice 🙂  Most of these 3D programs work about the same, it's just a matter of getting used to the workflow.  I'm going to try a loft with horizontal cross sections and see if that does the trick.  Basically, take the pool outline, copy it down in Z a few times and reshape to reflect the walls and pool bottom.  Not sure if it will work...

 

Take a look at this.  Boats are complicated too.

 

Edited by jeff prince
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9 hours ago, jeff prince said:

 

Practice, practice, practice 🙂  Most of these 3D programs work about the same, it's just a matter of getting used to the workflow.  I'm going to try a loft with horizontal cross sections and see if that does the trick.  Basically, take the pool outline, copy it down in Z a few times and reshape to reflect the walls and pool bottom.  Not sure if it will work...

 

Take a look at this.  Boats are complicated too.

 

True that most 3D programs work in a similar way. In theory. However, programs having dedicated boat design programs tend to provide way better shape control than standard  CAD / 3D modeling programs. How efficiently it works is another matter. Some years ago, a friend of mine, a professional naval architect, decided to draw a canoe in MaxSurf and TouchCAD. Both have dedicated boat designing features, but the same shape took two hours in Maxsurf and seven minutes in TouchCAD....

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So, lofting didn't work so well, probably due to the changing number of vertices in the defining curves I made.

Jonathan fixed my account problem on his website, so I tried out the tutorial @fabrica mentioned this morning:

https://learn.archoncad.com/blog/2011/02/28/sst_1102-creating-a-swimming-pool/

@Mason2152 A membership to Jonathan's website is a great investment.  The first pool I did took a dozen iterations to get it in the ballpark using my basic understanding of VW and using the help menu.  The second pool took about eight tries to get it close.  This morning, adapting techniques from Archoncad, a single iteration to produce the model below.  It took me an hour from scratch, including reading the tutorial, texturing with the VW included library, and rendering.

 

Getting closer, but VW did not know how to fillet the transition between the deep and shallow ends (probably due to the edge falling on a curved wall).

 

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Note aforementioned bottom fillet fail at transition.

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Section is watertight and well formed

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Nice solid model detailing...Bull nose radius on the entire curved coping was flawless.

Tile inset was done by forming a solid, duplicating it in place, subtracting one from the pool wall, and placing the remaining one on a separate class with different texture assignment.

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1 minute ago, Mason2152 said:

@jeff prince I tried lofting late last night and it did nothing like I wanted, but I have little experience with it. Your last product looks amazing. I'll look into joining the Jonathan group. Thanks for all your help.

Thanks and no problem.

I've been learning a lot of VW skills simply by reading this forum and trying to figure out how to do what people are asking help with... if it is something I envision needing to do in the future.  This pool thread for instance has helped me a great deal in preparing for my next project rather than trying to figure it out under a deadline.  Trial and error takes a lot of time, so Jonathan's task based tutorials are a great time saver.  If you are just starting out with 3D modeling, quality instruction gets you going on the right foot and will avoid lots of frustration.  Good luck on your journey!

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