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Excuse the poor lighting – I can’t just set the environment to Noon like in Second Life
On our real life porch we have a few decorative stained glass star lamps hanging on the wall. I was starring at one the other day and couldn’t help trying to figure out how I would model it in Blender. I’m still somewhere on the learning curve, where this would be a pretty decent challenge.
I’ve had enough practice to have a decent game plan. Start with a 5-sided cylinder, rotate and scale it, do-something-yet-to-be-leaned to extrude the faces into points, inset everything, and viola!
I’m kicking myself now for not taking screenshots along the way, and honestly I was doing this half asleep at 2am, and I hardly remember what I did. I didn’t think I was going to turn it into a blog post at the time. I will going forward.
From what I remember:
The cylinder shaping went smoothly. Figuring out how to divide each side face diagonally wasn’t too difficult. A Blender Stack Exchange q&a described it in easy steps, which I repeated for each face. I was able to select each new vertex and scale the points out.
The inset. I thought this would be easy. Select each face, inset individual, and be done. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite creating the resulting inset edges in the right proportions. It was stretching the inside edges of the star too much. I remedied this by selecting each one and repositioning it closer, kind of eye-balling it. Why not. Even the original was leaded stained glass with size imperfections.
From there I extruded the faces in, then beveled the outer edge. That’s where I left off. I’ve hit my achilles heel – my issue with beveled edges. In real life very few things have a razor sharp edge. There’s always a little rounded-ness to them. I’ve struggled with trying to reproduce that with Blender and Second Life for a long time. There are plenty of techniques, but none that I’m comfortable with.
So for now this is another unfinished in-progress project. At least by posting it here on the blog, it will be one more reminder to revisit learn how to do better edges.
