modeling a complex coral pendant lamp

Hello.

Normally the modeling part is not a problem while I work, but now I want to model this complex lamp:

http://www.dwr.com/product/coral-pendant.do?sortby=ourPicks

the lamp consists of many of those “hand-shaped” pieces. each got a beginning an 4 “fingers” which are connected to each other. now the whole thing is a sphere.

Is there any method, to do this properly?

i did this now very amateurish - but I dont really have a clue how to do it in another way.


would love to get some help here :slight_smile:

greets nik

You could create one star, then use dupliverts to space it around an object of say an icosphere.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Objects/Duplication/DupliVerts

Icospehere, bevel, invert selection and delete faces. And bevel again if you want.
Edit: sorry wrong style.

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@FloridaJo An interesting feature. Didn’t know that, but doesnt seem to work here. But I will remember it for other purposes. Thank you!

@JuhaW: Not quite the shape I was looking for :smiley: But nevertheless useful, if I don’t get the other thing to work, I will do something with that. Thank you!

There is no simple solution for covering a sphere with irregular pentagons. The math on it is heavy. The reference is ‘Penrose Tiling’ if you want to google it.

some script for

Penrose tiles


http://preshing.com/20110831/penrose-tiling-explained/

happy bl

wow thats great. totally worth it to ask here in the forum :slight_smile:

thius penrose tiling is indead interesting

As is often the case with tessellation it looks magical and I think ‘aperiodic’! ‘Penrose’! Yeah! But it turns out that this is a rather simple tessellation after all. Sorry to have misled you. Will post the steps to repro this in just a few.

So very quickly: add a dodecahedron. You can add the standard one, then join each pair of faces to make them into pentagons then poke faces then to sphere. Or you could just save yourself a lot of work and add a ‘pentakis dodecahedron’ with all this work done for you already.
Optionally you could go from step three (poke faces) straight to step seven, skipping the spherization. This will give you a flatter ‘star’. Your example probably has flat ‘stars’.

Now each triangle has to be subdivided with two cuts, dividing each side into three. hen dissolve some edges and use J to join the unconnected vert to the center. Now - ha! - do this for every triangle on your solid. There are 60.
You can also try duplifacing to see if you can make the geometry separately and distribute it all in one action. Good luck.


Once you have the new geometry in place you can bevel and delete the faces etc. as described above and in many places.


I fast tried it. And thought there is something not quite working that way and I already wanted to post it.

But then I rethought the whole thing and saw my mistake:


now i see if i can get with this technique the exact version of my desired lamp.

Looks like you are almost there. Some more deleting of faces needed…

And looks like the original shape is T-Y-shape, not regular pentagon.

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are you looking for this pentakis dodecahedron ?


happy bl

Got it with the exact model BruBan helped me to get. But it got really complicated. I spent way to long on this now :stuck_out_tongue: But i got it.



so here’s a short summary of what I made after several tries and failures :smiley:

its still not quite the same as on the reference. but now i’m able to get that with a little bit more work andd everything is made properly and not amateurish as at the beginning of this post.

thank you guys, you really helped me here to get on the right direction. learned some new cool features to work more efficiently

I tried simple one shape, array object offset empty and then duplifaces to dodecahedron.

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when I look at first post
I have a problem with how the fingers are connected !
up down or same level ?

happy bl

in the real one are the fingers up down connected. in my final version on my last post its on the same level, im going to change that.

btw, in the 8th picture in my latest post: its important that you make an edge split before you separate the faces. so are the pieces not stuck together, which is important if you want to move them up and down a little bit

Great Work! Big props for sticking with the process and ironing out the problems for the desired result. I think the last little step of adjusting the connectors overlap will really do it for an exact match.