So, as many of you know, I have taken a hiatus from BATing because of a stupid exporting problem in 2014; anyways, I started a new project, saw reddons thread, and decided to do something similar; in that order.   Since I'm going to be doing this process anyways, I downloaded 2012 again, and imported my current project into that. I am also going to be looking into how much fixing and tweaking my previous projects would require from a backwards save.   Again, I credit this idea completely to reddonquixote, I'm totally copying him, and I think that me explaining my process will help both myself and others. I will probably go over a lot of things he does, but I am just going to be doing my whole system. If I mention a tool and don't explain where it is, or you don't see it where I have it. Just google it   Without further ado, I present the Jewelers Building.   (a little bit more of ado: this was in progress before I decided on this so I already had a little bit done)   - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -    The first step in any BAT is collecting reference material: pictures, heightmaps, floorplans, etc. One of my biggest resources for dimensions is Google Earth. It's ruler tool is accurate to about a meter, a few percent in terms of BATing: great!     Just locate your building and, using the ruler tool, find some nice horizontal places to measure. My building is about 45m x 50m in it's footprint, and has many other recesses and stuff that I also measured with the same process. Take note of all these measurements. Next, if you can, I like to get my hands on some orthographic drawing of any direction. I found this one:     With this, I can refine all my measurements I took earlier. This, however doesn't have any readable measurements on it. Oh no! But we can still get all the good stuff using photoshop or gimp. Using the ruler tool there, we can set up a ratio using the known height of the building, and the height in pixels and any distance we can imagine on the orthographic view. With all of these measurements, we can start implementing them into the prototype. This, I already did, and it requires a lot of use with the tape measure tool in 3ds max.  After using these to make the prototype, I came up with:     Now at this point I had already started working on medium sized details on the roof but there it is. It's a very simple shape, but it has very accurate dimensions, and everything I make will be based off of this model.   Let's now continue/start working on the medium sized details. It doesn't matter where you start, just that you start somewhere. For this particular model, I decided to work on the gazebo at the top first because it looked like something I wanted to work with.  As for the main shape, I started with a cylinder with enough subdivision for each section and extruded out or up and beveled. Etc,.    Now, what I have left on the gazebo is the dome.      First is to start with a sphere. I looked at some pictures of the dome: and tried to figure out how much subdivision I needed on the sphere. When I looked I saw that there seemed to be a 3:1 ratio between the center parts, and the ornamentation. Also, things like this generally come in 16s, so 16 x 4 = 64: my sphere should be subdivided 64 times. I also chopped it down and deleted the bottom to be a hemisphere and deleted the top part where it starts being vents.       Now I want to make the recesses in the dome. This can be done very easily and very efficiently using just a few steps. Start by selecting a single horizontal running edge, change the dotgap value to 3 (this will insert 3 spaces between every select edge in a dot loop, 3:1 ratio ) Hit the dot loop button, and you have a nice loop around your hemisphere selecting every 4 edges.   Now we hit the ring button or ctrl + r, and this will select all of the ring going vertically. Once we have this, we can ctrl + click on the polygon subselection and this will transfer the edge selection over to polygon selection.      Now we shift + click on any polygon on the bottom ring and the top ring, and this will extend the polygon selection all the way around there.     The last selection trick is to invert the selection. Ctrl + i will invert our selection. Now we have something nice to work with.     Just a few insets, bevels and extrudes and now we have some recesses, just like we wanted.     We go to border selection now, select our hole from the deleted top, and cap it.     Now we use inset and bevel tools to approximate the shape of the top terrace. Whenever there is a rounded part, we do not round it. We make it as sharp a corner as possible for a new step...     We select the loop of edges on the sharp corner (ctrl + L) and then open the windowed chamfer tool (the dark grey box in the button next to the chamfer tool). With this, we can increase edges, and change our distance of chamfer. This will make a nice curve depending on how many segments you want.      Now we want to add a sort of exponential looking curve to the top part. So we select the ring at the top...     ... connect, and scale the loop we get down. Make it nice and small so when we chamfer it'll be the right type of curve. Make sure when we chamfer from one side to another, so that it overlaps the sides     Once we chamfer, we'll have overlapping edges and vertices, so let's fix that. Transfer edge selection to vertices, and grow it a few times. Then do a weld to merge all the vertices together.  
  Now we will add the metal tubethings that I can see at the top. First we select the loop we want then do a dot ring with a dotgap of 1. These will be the splines that make up the metal tube things.     Click on the create shape from selection button, and switch it to linear. Then we just adjust the values for the spline, make it renderable and viewable, etc.     Let's make a quick lip at the top of this, and we are done with the medium sized details at the top of the tower.     There we go