Why 5?

Here 5 explains why 5 prefers 5!
1:
5 is mainly in contrast with 4, that is to say the rectangle, or the square. Nearly all the shapes you encounter in RL or in SL are rectangular or combinations of rectangles. This has a reason: these shapes fit easily together. 99% of beds, books, rooms, houses, buildings, windows, paintings.
Only some shapes, because of aerodynamics or movement through the water have very complicated elongated shapes, like airplanes, ships, propellers. But in the end the dominance of the rectangular becomes repetitive. Worse still, is the fact that this combining easily together is in sharp contrast with the human. Humans don’t fit easily together. But that is what humans try nonetheless all the time. To work together, to live together, to go on holiday together. And then they are always surprised that it either is very difficult, or impossible to stay together. Why are they surprised? Is this because they are used to seeing all kinds of things combine easily, the rectangulars?
2:
So 5 looked for others shapes, and in particular a shape which isn’t too repetitive, so triangles, and hexagons were also banned, being able to fill the plane without holes. Beehives of course are hexagonal. Above hexagons the shapes with 7 9 or 11 and more sides quickly become very circular, or too close to a circle to be discernable. The pentagon has a very recognizable shape, very different from the square. And look at combinations of pentagons! Always different, leaving holes open, and all different combinations quickly show there own “character”.
3:
So geometry, this very logical branch of mathematics displays something strange: it already has something irregular in it’s logic. That’s interesting! The pentagon as a shape is extremely regular, and combinations of this shape are irregular. Isn’t this a bit like the human being? Following laws but also breaching them. Repetitive and creative. The human being must be like that, it is the mark bench of survival.
4:
Flowers are 70% of the time having 5 petals. Why is that? Well, there is no real why of course, but if starting from a center (the stem) and having to cover the plane, a very convenient way seems to be to split up in 5. But you see nature being very explorative and not obeying one strict law: flowers are coming in 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, double 5, triple 5, and even more complicated shapes like the flowers of orchids. Since we are surrounded by flowers, nobody can say that the pentagon is not known in nature! (Not to mention our hands, the five senses etc.)
5:
If you take a pentagon, and fit another to it, rotating it to have a common side, and repeat this process around a common axis, you get a spiral of pentagons with a nice property: is displays a sort of false perspective on cubes! Of course the pentagon cannot be seen isolated from the square and the hexagon; the five sided shape is just part of the enormous amount of possibilities. After having seen these ‘false’ cubes coming out of pentagons, 5 discovered the so called Penrose tiling. Penrose, a scientist, also played around with pentagons and discovered the false pentagons being able to cover the plane in a not repetitive way. The football is a combination of pentagons and hexagons, by the way?
Funny is that space is normally quite “square”, (called a vector space, after going 10 meters left and 10 meters to the right, you end up on the same spot as after 10 meters right and 10 to the left), but in the thoughts of Einstein, space became, “more than square”, that is to say, he needed a space being able to depart from this squareness, or needing a fifth side to connect left-right with right-left. So although for us small human beings square space is sufficient, the universe needs “more”.

Conclusion: the pentagon is a very interesting shape, being able to demonstrate what we need as human beings: very individual combinations and a lot of open air (the holes between the pentagons when combined) between us, to be able to establish a healthy and creative relation with other human beings!
In the DevShed can be found 3 simple ways to construct a pentagon in SL, (there must be 5!)
There are much more connections to the 5, like the golden ratio, Fibonacci, but well, you can find that yourself!

Sculpty - mania

After a couple of days, and the very tedious process of learning all shortcuts in Blender, the UV mappings started working. You have to read the few pages about making sculpties with Blender with extreme care. Simply overlooking one small button (Five forgot to put the texture on ADD, instead of MIX) makes your sculpty picture unusable.
Also you have to learn to work with the special but beautiful tool in Blender called ….very appropriate “Sculpt Mode”. In this mode, you can work on a model as if it is clay, adding and deleting material. Smoothing it again makes the shape beautifully organic. Then you have to get used to the way Blender throws this grids on the UV mapping which is without doubt very logical, but can be a bit strange too.


After saving the image, it is often inside out, and you have to deal with a negative texture color. Lately the UV image was saved at an angle of 90 degrees, so Five had to turn it back in Photoshop. You have to learn looking at the UV maps produced by Blender and know, if it is about right.


But well who cares, if the results are really fun!
First of all, Five March made the human shape, the torso. Then Five tried to pull out the arms as far as possible (discovering the in between tool for the grid steered by the mouse wheel – oh boy!), but the long arms were only partially represented in the shape of the torso inworld. Maybe the 3D centre can be arranged in a better way?
Then a mouse shape was sculpted, you can sculpt in a symmetrical way, so both sides are done at once, for two sided animals and humans a quick way to get a basic shape.
And how about these shapes, what a difference now with the ingenious but primitive shapes of many, many prims….what will all be possible? Indeed a lot! Not possible are shapes with holes, but then simple use two sculpties…
Five’s first try-outs look stupid now…..
All these try-outs can be found in the DevShed, on Virgin Island2.
The most beautiful sculpty, indeed it has got the first prize in the sculpty contest of a few months ago is of course the horse of Nomasha Syaka.
Below an image, which shows the sculpty-textures on the shapes. This is of course not necessary.
This horse even can be seen galloping around, but the sculpties take a long time to render so, sometimes balloons are seen instead of legs…..

Five guesses that the possibilities of the sculpties will really change the whole look of SL, an end of an era!