Practical ways vs impractical ways

#1

I’m a beginner, in true sense of words. I need a reference image at all times. I wanted to model a satellite. This was the image I used for reference in C4D:

Notice how everything’s geometrical and easy. I managed to do everything with primitive objects. I had to convert a hemisphere to a polygon to get the dish right. Then I faced the real challenge. You see those stupid lines inside the dish? Being a beginner, I surely faced a tantrum modeling them.

I want everything to be practical. I thought of using an arc spline, then using sweep. But arc splines cannot be manipulated. I spent hours trying to find a way. Finally, I used circle splines and swept them with a small circle. The result, more or less, was not what I expected:

As you can see, it’s really unprofessional, and ugly. In other words, impractical. What practical way would you suggest to achieve the look?

#2

Never used C4D but in 3d max you’d simply select the edges inside the dish, detach them as splines and convert them into editable poly, tweak whatever you need to get the shape and you’re done in a few minutes.

#3

I have an old copy of C4D at home so I can check exactly how at home, but as Psyk0 mentioned, the important part is getting the edges from the dish to get the shape right.

In Blender I would duplicate one of the edges and separate into it’s own object. I’d convert it to a spline and either then use that to create my shape directly or use modifiers in order to customise things a bit more.

#4

Everyone uses references and blueprints, except for something completely fantastic. And even there it helps when modelling technical details on starships for example, or anatomic references for creatures and so on…

There are a lot of ways you can do this, but the edge-to-spline method would work the fastest i think. Go to edge mode, select the necessary edges on the dish object then select the edge to spline command (Mesh - Commands - Edge to Spline), it won’t use interpolation at this point so if it looks too angular (depending on your dish mesh) you could select the spline points, right click and select Use Soft Interpolation.
To control the interpolated point density you can then select the spline and in the attributes adjust the angle value (its probably set to adaptive by default). Higher values means lesser interpolated points - you can get a lot of useless polygons really quickly with splines if you keep this at the default values, especially when using sweeps with circles for example, so always set this to a value thats sufficient to get a decent shape but not a lot more.

From there you could use a sweep object with a rectangle spline for example, make sure to create the rectangle in perspective view (the orientation changes when you create it in one of the orthographic views, chances are that the sweep won’t get the rectangle shape right then), and you should end up with something similar looking. Adjust the thickness over the sweet nurb length in the sweep settings, the outer part seems to be a bit smaller and adjust the edge sharpness by selecting the rectangle object and play with the roundness setting (as perfectly sharp edges look quite unnatural).