Five Pointed Star

I'm trying to make a five pointed star shaped seat..i was thinking to make a five sided object..then attach a triangle to each of those sides..to make the star..can anyone advise an easy way to do this..sizes..angles etc..?

thanx in advance guys

Abel, the easiest way is to send you one so I've sent it in-world.
For info there's geometry details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagram

Most economical way to make is three overlapping triangles called Golden Gnomons - wish that was a name available in SL!!

Carbon

360/5 = 72, so just create a triangle and copy it four times, rotating it 72 degrees each time (using the edit box). Then once you've got that as a template, you can reduce prims by stretching triangles to cross the center.

I wouldn't use triangles. If you do, you'll either end up with flicker where they all overlap each other, or you'll have to have a hole in the center of your star, which you'd have to spend a few extra prims filling it in. Economy in 2D and practicality in 3D are not always the same thing.

For the cleanest possible results, forget triangles, and use oblong diamonds. Here's how:

1. Rez a default cube.

2. Twist it by +45 degrees at both ends, to turn it into a diamond.

3. Cut it from 0.075 to 0.425, to make it oblong, and to put the pivot point at the corner of the short end, instead of in the middle.

4. Size the Y dimension 0.156. Leave the other two dimensions at the default 0.500.

5. Shift-drag the cube to leave a copy behind, and then hit ctrl-Z to undo the movement of the original.

6. Rotate the original by 72 degrees on Z. You'll now see you've got the first two points of your star, and they should fit together perfectly.

7. Repeat the process to form the remaining three points, rotating each section by an additional 72 degrees (144, then 216, and then 28.

8. You'll now have a 5-pointed star, approximately .7 meters wide, and .5 meters thick. Set the thickness to whatever proportion you want it by resizing all five parts identically on the Z axis. Then link everything together, and scale the whole thing to whatever size you need.



That's if you want to use five regular prims. Alternative options would be either to make a star-shaped sculpty, or simply to slap a star texture with a transparent background onto the top and bottom of a thin cube and then put a fully transparent texture on the other four sides.

You'll only get flicker if you use a non-blank texture.

That's a nice construction, mind, if the two extra prims aren't a problem go with it.

What a wonderfull way of doing a 5 pointed star. I immediately tried it and it works like a charm... There is only one point, which i do not understand:
Why would i want to do that ?

EDIT: Ok i understand why i want to do that.... what a nice trick

Very much appreciated info Chosen, thank you!

Nice solution, Chosen. You must have played with Tangrams more than I did in your youth!

That is WAY cool, and it's generalizable to stars with any number of points. Nice work, Chosen.

Wow, I'd thought more people who'd been around a while were already aware of that technique, but evidently not. I'm really glad this thread came up. As Rolig pointed out, the concept is applicable to any number of points, so you'l find it ti be useful for a lot of things.

There is actually way more you can do with these kinds of double-positive twisted cubes, so experiment, experiment, experiment. Happy building.

primstars ...

I have been playing with this technology and now i am about to make a tutorial. Many thanks to Chosen for your great ideas



have fun,
Gaia

I suppose someone should get a gold star for these nice ideas.

thanx for all the great replies everyone...very much appreciated

Gaia, I assume the 1-prim 8-pointer is a sculpty? If not, do tell how it was made.

I must admit, that the 1 Prim star was a teaser It is an absolute precise sculpty with no flaws in LOD 3,2,1. It breaks at LOD0 though.

Although it could be made out of a 16*4 faces mesh, i used a 64*16 mesh, because at this moment smaller sculptmaps can not be imported lossless to SL.

Finally ...

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/12/20/the-primstar/

Chosen, you will love it ))

Have fun,
Gaia

That's awesome, Gaia!

Should I start typing with that echoed voice? "Yooooze a foooorrrrtttyyyy fiiive degreeee twiiiiist." Hah, does it work?

How did Domino get to be so tiny?

Oh, and the guy who commissioned the star, he didn't happen to have six fingers on his right hand, did he?

Hi, Chosen. I love to hear that you had fun watching the video
To your questions:

- "use a 45 degree twist..." and the hole construction of the 5 prim primstar was a citation of "chosen Few" from this forum thread. Please note that you are mentioned in the credit roll BTW: The existence of the one prim primstar was also first mentioned here ( )

- We didn't make the Guru so tiny. We recreated the kitchen sink using huge prims Oh, maybe i should mention that we originally had not in mind to associate Domino with the "Guru". But when watching the final version we found it was so funny and we decided to keep it as is. I hope, Domino won't complain. In the next movie he will return as "ghost in the bottle" and he might get a much longer voice part then... Shall we change his voice ?

- And the Monk has got 5 fingers at each hand. It must be an optical effect that sometimes 6 fingers are "seen"...

Hehe, I didn't mean any of those questions literally.

Thank you for the nod in the credits. Yes, I got the reference right away. I'm flattered that you'd caricature me as a golden oracle.

I've never met Domino in person, but somehow I always thought he'd be a little taller that THAT. But yes, having him so tiny was hilarious, and his voice was perfect. Don't change a thing. "How did he get so tiny" was a rhetorical question.

The "six finger" thing was a reference to The Princess Bride. In that movie, the Six Fingered Man is a mysterious figure from one of the characters' past. He had refused to pay for a priceless object, in much the same way that your cloaked monk refused to pay for the star. Heh, I might be a stickler for details, but trust me, I'm not obsessive enough to go around counting avatar fingers from shot to shot in a machinema piece. I do tend to think in movie quotes, though. What can I say, I grew up in front of the TV.


Anyway, once again, superb job on the film, and thanks again for the flattery.

What the hell, I'll post in this thread too. I think Gaia and crew absolutely NAILED it referencing the oracle to you Chosen, but don't let it get to your head ok, we need you down here tending to us minions LoL. They did the same with Domino and I don't seem him minding in the least, he's actually a pretty funny guy from what I hear. And Gaia, your caricature of yourself was hilarious, the script lines and your delivery was impeccable. Even if people aren't Blender and Primstar users they should watch this just for the quality of the entertainment it's so well done.

I am so happy I can't tell. Thank you soo much for all your positive feedback. And apologize for taking your questions literally Chosen. I knew somehow you meant it differently. But i swear i started the editor and counted the Monk's fingers before i answered to your contrib You know, sometimes i just don't get the true meaning of what is said so i take many things literally...

About the video: It took us about 6 weeks for making this film, more than 200 hours of work. Most of the time it was pure fun to make it. The oracle was a challenge at the end. The main problem was how to technically integrate it seemless into the film. But we found a solution. The other challenge was the animations. We only used 3 custom animations and we developed a technique to make them look a bit better (more lively) as usual. Unfortunately we only found it out when the film was close to finish. So we expect this to be seen in its full glory in our future work.

My dream is to create tutorials like "The primstar" on a regular basis. But 30 hours of working time per minute of film is a bit too much for us In the future we know that we can get more efficient, but we expect to still need 10 Hours per minute at minimum. Not counting the endless hours of making a script

So many thanks again for your feedback. I love you all for that
And i will do my best to produce more of such stuff.

cheers, Gaia

Looking forward to seeing more, Gaia. I think this may just be the best tutorial format I've ever seen. There's no way anyone would forget the material. It's just part of the plot. People will learn without even knowing they're learning, which is awesome.

As for the amount of time involved, if it makes you feel any better, Pixar's ratio, last I heard, is 8 man-hours per 10 seconds of animation. And that's just the animation. Factor in modeling, rigging, texturing, lighting, rendering, post processing, etc., and it's plain to see why it takes 3-4 years to make a 90 minute film.

If you can do 10 hours per minute (1 hour and 40 minutes per 10 seconds), or even if you stay at your present 30 hours per minute (5 hours per 10 seconds) you're operating at warp speed, compared to what it takes for traditional 3D amination. Go, go, machinema.

That was very charming, and much more fun than a torley video.