Friday, December 31, 2010

Star Cube Tiaras!

I've been playing with Blender 2.55 (beta) and making some virtual objects. It's fun, and since playing with a paper and a compass is my idea of relaxing, it's mostly relaxing, too.


I wanted to make a tiara of stars. So I fiddled around and managed to create a Python program that would calculate the angles and make stars with as many points as I wanted. Blender draws virtual objects by collecting a set of points together and then associating them into sets of object faces; the whole collection of points and faces is called a mesh. I even got to use the golden ratio, phi, to make the star's arm's lengths come out the right length to make a perfect-looking five point star.

Then I discovered that the Python function that rotates meshes, bpy.ops.transform.rotate, is on the bug list. Meaning that it doesn't work. Meaning that I can't be lazy and use a program to place perfect five-point stars in an arc around the crown of a tiara.


Bother.





After a short sulk, I decided that the functions that create cubes, spheres, and other objects still work -- and they have built-in bits for rotation and placement. So. Here we go: Tiaras. Some day the bpy.ops.transform.rotate function will be fixed....

No comments: