Well I am not into cosplaying but I am into making. prop replica. The first step when such an idea strikes me, is to search thingiverse. But i could not find a good design. So I used Fusion 360 to build my own. Maybe Blender or Maya would have been the right choice for organic modelling but then I took what I knew the best.
1st Iteration – Extruding on Curved Surface
As a base to start from modelling the headband I used Manuel Bastionis ManuelbastioniLAB 1.5.0. It’s plugin for Blender that creates high quality humand characters completely rigged and fully customizable. I recommend having a look if you are into character animation. Also it’s free. I created a european female model, put it in t-pose and just cut off the top portion of the head and loaded it into Fusion 360. As Fusion is CAD and uses solid bodies you cannot directly or better said easily work with models exported from 3d modelling applications. There are options to use the Patch workspace to lay out the 3d model with faces and align them to the 3d model but I didn’t want to do all the work and just used the imported head part as reference.
I used two sketches to outline the models X and Y (Profile 1 & 2) and a third sketch as a protrusion (Rail) and while in PATCH Workspace the Loft tool helped to create a smooth organic face.
To actually model the headband around the refrence I used skteches which extruded onto the reference face. The front part with the star worked nice to a certain angular degree but if the sketch-to-object angle is too steep things get ugly. Extrusions are hard to align to each other and generally it is a big mess.
But at this time I was quite happy with it and about how fast I had finished it. I had to cheat though to make it look like one piece I managed to get this…
On the back view you can see the headstrap’s bottom line. It has a nice curvature which came out by extruding the skewed bottom vector of the sketch onto a ball-curved surface. I really like this feature. Also it was not intended. Call it Design by ignorance™. Finally after the design process this piece was ready to print. With minor support it took around 2 hours but to that time the extruder was not well adjusted and the print experienced some underextrusion. But before fixing the hardware and trying to print it again I revised the star-part of the tiara and I decided to redo it so it matches the movie tiara better. This way iteration no. 2 started:
This is the result before and after.
On the left side is the design which was extruded from two perdenticular sketches onto the curved head reference. The right side design was done with sketches. The redone version resembleed the original tiara from movie more but the curvature of the 1st iteration version looked better IMHO.
So instead of extruding the headband from 2d sketche to the head reference I created Construction Offsets at the specific level heights e.g. at the horizontal bounderies of the indentations.
Some renders:
And here it is printed
