In my geometry class, we are making icosahedrons (20 sided figure made from triangles) We put spikes on ours. So, here is my problem. I want to make an icosahedron in Blender with spikes on it. If you need a pic of an icosahedron, check this link…
But I need one with spikes like so…
So i need to find the middle of each of the triangles so i can scale them out. I can make an icosahedron without spikes no problem, just by clicking space > add mesh > icosphere > Subdivision 1. Now i just need spikes on each of those faces and its all good.
One more thing, I always hear it is bad or sumthing to model using triangles? is this true? if so, why? and in this case i dont think it really matters because i wont be adding any armatures etc… so. thnx in advance…
It’s fairly easy to do, but you need to learn a couple of new tools, or variations on old tools.
Make your icosahedrons, then extrude individual faces. Press escape, then scale the individual faces larger. (It will look as if the icosahedron is simply scaling, but there really are individual faces there.) Once you have scaled the faces out some, use the shrink tool (Alt+s) to move the vertices closer to each other, and to the center of the original faces. They will also shrink towards the center of the figure, but you can push them out again with a simple scale larger.
[Edit] Regarding the triangle issue: triangles don’t smooth well. This becomes an issue if you are animating, or if you are using subsurf, so it’s mainly of concern to people who do organic modeling, or hard surface modeling of anything with curved surfaces (cars, spaceship, robots…), or anything that changes shape when it’s animated. [/edit]
YAY, Orinoco, thnx a lot. I can’t believe I didnt think of extruding then making smaller… wow. I feel so stupid now! Also, to make it render faster i removed the doubles (took out about 40) and walla! i have an icosahedron it 10 seconds!!! Thank you so much. =D
