Seattle Space Needle

I do love to model buildings from nothing but picture.

I live no where near Seattle and yet my mom is a huge Seattle Seahawks fan. I saw this challenge and thought the it be cool to try and model up the Seattle Needle based on the images I could find on the net. I've loaded the model as a whole piece. I will be loading the individual pieces at a later time.

How I modeled this:
The best way when trying to do actual building, for me at least, is to see if there are any available images on Google or Bing that are Blue Print type images. The Seattle Space Needle has tons of blue print images and sketches. This allows you to import the image into a modeling software (in this case I used DraftSite). I could then trace the profile of the building to get its shape. Next thing is to find as many high resolution photos of the building. I look mainly at the topper since there were tons of images of this part. The legs were more tricky since I couldn't find any images that were straight on the legs. The best way to get this was estimating by using the images and my best judgement.Proportions are one of the harder things to get when estimating so trial and error was the biggest time sink.
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After the main body of the model was created I just had to fine tune the details. There are some details I left as a "Low Poly" such as the fins that hold the halo bar on the topper. These are actually two pieces of tubes. I left it as sold triangles only to keep from having really sharp overhangs. The topper may need supports but if I left those as tubes you'd risk breaking the tube when removing the supports.