Spherical Head

[mrhogg]

Hey all,
As part of my building of dotBoom2.0, I'm redesigning the puppets. A couple of them will have spherical heads, and here are the current heads for Mojo and Farrah, after five full attempts to get the right shape and size:


http://flickr.com/photos/inelegant/3118591261/in/photostream/

What do you think? Apparently a sphere is a tricky thing to build.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

A trick for doing perfect spheres is what's been referred to as (by me anyway) "the wedge method". You cut eight foam wedges that are exactly four times longer than they are wide, glue them together and you get a perfect sphere. Once you have that shape, you can cut out holes for the mouth and for your arm. The roundness of the shape can be varied by varying the shape and number of wedges.

 

[Keeermit]

I agree with buck, making a sphere with 8 segments is the easiest way to create the shape, once you get the right segment shape you can scale it up or down to any size sphere u want, goodluck

 

[mrhogg]

I used wedges like the rind of an orange slice, but I was trying to find the ratio. I think I might've gone more for a 3-1 than a 4-1, and as a result I was only able to get six wedges in before I couldn't fit any more in.

Also, it took me a couple attempts to realize that my occasional method of squeezing the foam pieces together, rather than holding in place until the glue dried, was affecting the shape. Word to the wise, a six-segment sphere, with the segments squeezed as the glue dries, results in something that looks a fair bit like a starfruit.

 

[yetiman]

Hey--I just was figuring out the same thing about a week ago. I put up a blog post doing all the math. If you have a compass and a straightedge, it's not really hard at all to come up with a sphere pattern.

Click here for the post