More Ankh Goodness

 The ankh saga continues...  since I had an SVG file created by Inkscape (see yesterday's post), that meant I could import it into Blender, turn the vectors into a manifest mesh, and then render the design as a 3-D object.

After fiddling around with the ankh, a white light and a blue light, and various planes, I came up with some designs that look like they should be on the cover of a 1980's ambient synthesizer band's album.

The images I liked the most had a white light behind the ankh to back-light it and a blue light just above the ankh in order to cast blue anti-shadows onto the plane behind.  I got different shadow effects by moving the backdrop farther or closer to the ankh.

I like the first image because the blue light behind makes the ankh look like it is descending from space, or like there's some mystic teleportation going on.







For the second image, I moved the blue light so it was in the junction of the vertical and horizontal openings in the ankh.  I like this one because the light is implying a second ankh behind or somehow extending out of the solid one.  It does look a little like a sword hilt, though.














The third image has some hour-glass suggestions going on in the background.   It's a little distracting, and makes the ankh look a little like a tattoo on some woman's mid-drift.  I placed the blue light at the base of the ankh, so there's a saturation of blue there.  There's also the teleportation ray going on, too.  I think I might crop this so that it's square.





The fourth is one of my favorites because it looks like the ankh is being put into a box made out of the sky.

Designing Ankhs

The other day I was fiddling around with sketches, and I wondered if I made an ankh using a half-circle and a triangle made out of two 3 x 4 x 5 right triangles how it would look.  My sketch looked better than the design I came up with, so I must be bad at guestimaiting what kind of triangles I use.  Actually, I often find that the designs I come up with which appear to use circles, squares and triangles in my sketches look wrong when I use Inkscape to make geometrically accurate circles, squares and triangles.

Once I saw that the loop wasn't going to work with pure circles and triangles, I reworked it by tweaking the spline-points on a regular circle and then finding a triangle that fit the loop and used it as the serifs for the ankh's arms.

During the process of moving thick-lined polygons around, designing the arms to be hollow suggested itself, and I ran with it.