Built up the queen and got her on the board.
What I did for the spikes was that I extruded all of the sections up to the top of the spikes. Of importance was that the cylinder that these were created from had an equal number of segments (otherwise would have had some oddities).
Once I had the level for the top of the spikes, I extruded (on top of current ring), hit enter (so that it is exactly the same size. Resized to be how big I wanted it at the inner part of the spikes, then translated that down to the level of the bottom of the crown. Extruded again, straight up to the top of the dome of the crown. Scaled it to nearly touching in the middle. Added a couple loop cuts (one in the middle, one between the middle and the top), moved and scaled them as needed to generate the base curve I wanted, then beveled them to make things a nicer shape. Then added the ball as shown in the video and boolean’ed (new word) them together and clobbered the old sphere.
To make the spikes, I grabbed every other vert on the crown, then translated them down a bit, and scaled to where I wanted them to be.
Initially the spikes were kind of like “sword tips”, initially I liked it, then when it rendered it looked a little off. So I selected each of the verts at the bottom of the crown spikes and scaled them out to more match the roundness of the rest of the crown.
Here’s what everything looks like in situ:
Close up on the queen:
Anyway, hope you like it. I’m having a good time learning blender and making the high poly (yeah, I’m a rogue, should be doing the low poly, but I’m really more interested in the high def stuff, so going that direction, but paying attention to the instruction on maintaining low poly count in case I need to for a game or something).