Help with hyperbolic curves

Hi there, i’m in college at the moment (English) doing 3D design and our unit is to design a stage and cafe to replace the one which is currently there near where I live. I have made a design and am struggling to make the shape of my design.
My design is very similar to that of the heydar aliyev center and its just making that curved bit at the front of the building i’m struggling to do. I cant find a tutorial that suits my problem anywhere and i was just wondering if anyone could tell me which tools I should be using and how to use them to make that curved shape at the front. Thanks

This is a pretty challenging shape to make. When you say your design is similar, can you be a little more specific? Depending on the actual contours, you may be able to make something close using the native SketchUp tools. If not, then you may be looking at using a plugin (or two). The video encapsulated at the end of this slide show gives some good visual information:

Can you provide a sketch or different views of your design?

Something to get you started …

Model: cylindrical_hyperbola.skp (22.5 KB)

[edited] The Heydar Aliyev Center is designed around hyperbolas. The cone and plane in the video above use the fact that the intersection of the two define a hyperbola:

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Hi, thanks for all the help the cone method you suggested works perfectly for it . Thanks agin :slight_smile:

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One way to start the roof…

The first model was roughed out by extruding a circle and rescaling the edge by tugging on the circle’s cardinal point and repeating a few times. Method detailed on the SketchUp Sage. After the base shape was formed, each circle entity needed to be exploded by r-click on each circle and choosing Explode curve. The second model shows what could be done with the Sandbox’s Smoove tool.

I found a construction photo that shows that the main shape in question appears to be saddle-shaped:

This looks a lot like a hyperbolic paraboloid:

Using the UV_Polygen plugin with x = u, y = v, and z = u2 - v2 for -1 <= u <= 1 and -1 <= v <= 1:

Plugin: https://sites.google.com/site/spirixcode/code/uv_polygen.rb

Model: saddle.skp (184.6 KB)

(BTW, There’s a newer version of UV_Polygen available on GitHub, but I’m not sure of the current status)

[added] Model with thickness added: saddle2.skp (358.1 KB)