To make this, I used Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator to take the image I blogged here, and then project it onto the faces of a rhombic dodecahedron. Next, I put that polyhedron into motion for the .gif shown below.
If you’d like to give Stella a free try, the site to visit is http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
This decagonal mandala is split into fifty golden triangles (shown in yellow), and forty golden gnomons (shown in orange).
The mandalas on the eight hexagonal faces of this truncated octahedron were first seen in the blog-post immediately before this one. The six square faces have been hidden, creating holes in their places.
I used Geometer’s Sketchpad and MS-Paint to make this pattern, based on a ring of twenty-two hendecagons. The work of projecting this image onto a polyhedron, as well as making this rotating .gif image, was performed using another program, Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. If you’d like to try Stella for yourself, there’s a free trial download available at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
Mandalas are used for meditation and contemplation. They are also supposed to represent the universe, which we now know is in a constant state of change. Generally, this means mandalas are non-moving images, and (traditionally) they certainly don’t flash. This is, therefore, an attempt to update the concept of the mandala for the modern age, reflecting our current understanding of the universe.
I made this years ago — in 2010 — and just found it today, on Facebook. That was two years before this blog started. I like finding such “lost works,” but it doesn’t happen often these days.
