I’ve been trying to figure out for over a year how to make images like the one above, without having holes in the two polyhedra, facing each other. At last, that puzzle of polyhedral manipulation using Stella 4d (software available at this website) has been solved: use augmentation followed by faceting, rather than augmentation followed by simply hiding faces.
The most common depiction of the compound of five cubes uses solid cubes, each of a different color:
This isn’t the only way to display this compound, though. If the faces of the cubes are hidden, then the interior structure of the compound can be seen. An edges-only depiction, still keeping a separate color for each cube, looks like this:
If these thin edges are then thickened into cylinders, that makes a third way to depict this polyhedral compound. It creates a minor problem, though: edges-as-cylinders looks awful without vertices shown as well, and the best way I have found to depict vertices, in this situation, is with spheres. With vertices shown as spheres, however, a sixth color, only for the vertex-spheres, is needed. Why? Because each vertex is shared by six edges: three from a cube of one color, and three from a second cube, of a different color.
Finally, here are all three versions, side-by-side for comparison, and with the motion stopped.
All images in this post were created using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, software you may try for free at this website.
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