BANANA BOAT

Bananas are a little distant from pumpkins in evolutionary terms, in among the Monocots along with Onions, Date Palms and the grasses.  There is a third group which we already visited, the Mangoliids.  Avocados belong in there along with useful stuff like Nutmeg, Cinnamon & Black Pepper.  Easy on the nutmeg though, you don't want to start hallucinating.

Making a couple of bananas was pretty easy.  If you look carefully you'll see that they're not the same.  Instance parameters make one a bit shorter and a bit straighter.  Fully scaleable of course.

But what about a bunch ?  For this I need an adaptive component, so I made a variant of my scaleable rig where the height is controlled by the placement of 2 adaptive points.  A little bit tricky, but not too hard.  Height becomes a reporting parameter which is then related to B (breadth ... or bendability perhaps) via a multiplication factor.

I got my banana the wrong way round at first so had to adjust the points.  No problem. By the way I've decided it's best to keep points separate where possible, so often use 0.99 instead of 1.  You might want to select the point later and this saves a good deal of trial and error tabbing.

I pushed the bottom end of the banana out because I want them to sit over each other in rows. 

For the bunch I started with a cone shape.  Parametric of course.  Divide surface & show nodes.  Then place a banana.

Repeater will make a vertical stack.  Need some adjustment here.  Decided a curve would help so the bananas change angle with each row. After a couple more adjustments I was getting close.

Then I found that I could control the banana angle independent ot the cone shape, by using the parameter that controls the ratio between length & breadth.  So I renamed this "lift" because tweaking this will lift a whole row away from the row beneath.

Soon I have a nice bunch of green bananas.  Oh and by the way, here are the profile parameters.  I need to find better names for the adjustment factors ( X, Q, P & F ! )  Actually I didn't use these much once I had my first banana up & running.  They mostly serve to link everything back to W so I can scale it all up together.

So what did I want a bunch of bananas for ?  I'm turning them upside down to make a witch's hat of course.  That's why I turned them green.  Once again I'm going to give a round of applause to the orthographic views.  Splendid chaps.  Couldn't live without them.

This is a dummy run at the face-by-assembly idea.  Going to bring in vegetables one by one.  The nose has to be a sweet potato.  Another quick aside.  I didn't realise for the longest time that you can copy and past objects from a link directly into the host project.  This was a neat way to bring stuff in from my veggie collection to my face assembly file.

Tomatoes had better be rosy-red cheeks.  (All the better to fool you with, Snow White)

Cranking it up a gear we have avocado eyes.  And the eyebrows are probaby chilli peppers (bit of poetic license there) 

Moving on we get a radial array of okra for the brim of the hat, monstrously huge aubergines make nice beefy forearms which link to the bean-pod hands via a stalk that is starting to look very like one of captain hook's appendages.  Mixing my fairy tales up nicely here.

I didn't make an apple yet, so while I'm taking liberties, why not tempt the girl with a juicy red pepper ?  The other hand needs to hold a basked.  Flashing light bulb.  Couple of months ago I had this idea that I could make a pumpking using curtain panels on a divided surface plus some randomising.  Didn't work out too well.  I got some interesting forms but not pumpkins.  More like baskets in fact.

They were also rather big, so when I scaled one down I got this fascinating fellow.  Could be useful for doing the washing up perhaps.

Never mind, we can have a non-randomised basket for the moment.  (too lazy to go back into excel just now)  And so as not to waste it, I'll turn one of the big ones upside down and put it in the background.  Now it's a zulu style behive hut.

Time to display my sources of inspiration.  I need a witch ... so it's going to be Snow White and a clip from Disney's classic 1937 cartoon version.  See the foliage in the background, I misread that as a thatched roof, which provided the justification for the Zulu hut.  That's one reference image.  The other is Arcimboldo, court artist to the Habsburgs.  He will provide some insight into making faces from vegetables. 

Please note, I am not trying to copy either of these sources in any direct way.  They are points of departure and may provide hints on how where I am going wrong from time to time. 

So another pumpkin for the upper torso, more eggplant arms and bean pod hands ... that's as far as I got at my first attempt. 

There's a lot of work to do.  Not getting the sneaky look at all yet.  Nice vegetables, but not much of a witch.