More Papercraft: Wagnerian Tiara

Somehow, I forgot the Wagnerian Tiaras I made in the list of 2013 Papercraft.







I suppose that I shouldn't call the "Wagnarian."  I first saw something like this in 1983, worn by Hecate in a performance of MacBeth.   I always wanted one since.






 In June, I took the tiaras to a local MakerSpace gathering and my friends Mark and Jenn modeled them.

Tiara of a Harkonian Princess.

Lately, I've been playing with Blender to make tiaras. Probably what I'm coming up with is closer to crowns. In a recent breakthrough -- both in the beta-release rotate function and in my understanding of Python string functions -- I've managed to manipulate multiple star shapes. This means that I will soon be able to make mathematically precise star tiaras!



It seems appropriate, therefore, to go back to source materials, like this 4000 year old tiara (on display in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian Wing). What I like about this tiara is its level of detail and its mixture of animal heads and flowers.  This headpiece says it all subtly:  "My flowers are solar; my animal's horns are lunar -- I'm wearing the heavens as adornment."

I don't think I'm at the modeling animal heads stage of Blender just yet... but someday.

Star Tiara

After a hard day editing multiple manuscripts and installing Scrivener on several machines, there's nothing like kicking back at the end of a day and designing a star tiara.  Even if I do have to do the geometry by hand once I have the stars.

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....