Hey everyone. My name is Sam and I'm excited to share a project I've been working on. In honor of Dassault Systemes' French heritage and the arrival of Bastille Day next week, I decided it would be fun to model the architecture of the famous Arc de Triomphe completely in SOLIDWORKS. Fueled by my love for architectural design, this project was an excellent way to test new tools in SOLIDWORKS and marvel at a piece of French culture (that isn't the football team 😉 ).
I began the model with a simple sketch and extrusion of the main body, scaling my dimensions based on the actual size of the monument. Once the shape came together, it dawned on me how many details were necessary to flesh out the structure - I was in for a wild ride. First, I was met with the challenge of creating the circumscribed overhangs. Initially stumped, I found it extremely easy to utilize the "3D sketch" tool to simply sketch a rectangular path around the building and do a sweep extrusion of my preferred profiled. After some fine tuning to the shaping and dimensions, I feel the overall shaping of the true Arc de Triomphe was coming together. Next, I added some simple extrusions to each wall to provide more detail, mirroring details over center planes to create the symmetry on each side of the arc. For the features on the top, I did linear patterns of different extrusions to continue detailing the profile of the terrace.
The most difficult task I was challenged with was recreating the detailed sculptures and carvings around the structure. To do this, I simply placed images of each carving on sketch planes and roughly traced the geometric shapes of each carving. The result is an amalgamation of low poly details that provide some further detailing to the model. Here is an example of how I recreated these features:
This 3D print was done using the Form 3 SLA printer, located in the Boston 3DEXPERIENCE FabLab. Overall, this project was a lot of fun to work on and an excellent way to challenge my own design skills. It is always a great experience using SOLDIWORKS to bring my ideas into the physical world! I'm excited to work on more projects in the future!