This beauty appeared unexpectedly when I was playing around with polyhedra related to the icosahedron and dodecahedron, using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. You can try this program for yourself, free, at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
The twenty faces of this polyhedron are six small blue squares, six interpenetrating, larger red squares, and eight irregular, interpenetrating yellow hexagons. I made it using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, which you can try for free at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php. The squares are easy to find, but it can be a challenge to see the yellow hexagons. In the .gif below, all of the yellow faces but one are hidden, which should make it easier to see where the hexagons are positioned, relative to the squares.
I made this faceting of the rhombicosidodecahedron using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. You can try this program out, for free, at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
I created these faceted polyhedra using Stella 4d, a program you can try for free at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
The great rhombicosidodecahedron is also known as the truncated icosidodecahedron. I created this faceting of it using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, which you can try for free at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
The polyhedron above is the truncated icosahedron, widely known as the pattern for most soccer balls. In the image below, the faces and edges have been hidden, leaving only the vertices.
To make a faceted version of this polyhedron, these vertices must be connected in novel ways, creating new edges and faces. There are many faceted versions of this polyhedron, of which seven are shown below.
I used Stella 4d to make these polyhedral images, and you’re invited to try the program for yourself at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
This is the rhombicosidodecahedron. It is considered by many people, including me, to be the most attractive Archimedean solid.
To create a faceted polyhedron, the first step is to get rid of all the faces and edges, leaving only the vertices, as shown below.
In the case of this polyhedron, there are sixty vertices. To create a faceted version of this polyhedron, these vertices are connected by edges in ways which are different than in the original polyhedron. The new positioning of edges defines new faces, often in the interior of the original polyhedron. Here is one such faceting, with the red hexagonal faces in the interior of the now-removed original polyhedron.
The rhombicosidodecahedron can be faceted in many different ways. I don’t know how many possible facetings this polyhedron has, but it is a finite number much larger than the ten shown in this post. Here’s another one.
In faceted polyhedra, many faces intersect other faces, as is the case with the red and yellow faces above. The next faceting demonstrates that faceted polyhedra are sometimes incredibly complex.
Faceted polyhedra can even contain holes that go all the way through the solid, as seen in the next image.
Sometimes, a faceting of a non-chiral polyhedron can be chiral, as seen below. Chiral polyhedra are those which exist in “left-handed” and “right-handed” reflections of each other.
Any chiral polyhedron may be fused with its mirror image to form a compound, and that’s exactly what was done to produce the next image. In addition to being a polyhedral compound, it is also, itself, another faceted version of the rhombicosidodecahedron.
All these polyhedral manipulations and gif-creations were performed using a program called Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. If you’d like to try Stella for yourself, please visit http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php, where a free trial download is available.
The rest of the rhombicosidodecahedron-facetings needed to round out this set of ten are shown below, without further comment.
I made this using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. You can try this program for free at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
This is one of many possible facetings of the truncated icosahedron. I made it using Stella 4d, which you can try for yourself at this website: http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
This particular faceting of the rhombcuboctahedron can also be viewed as a cluster of stella octangulae. I made it using Stella 4d, polyhedron-manipulating software you can try, for yourself, at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
RobertLovesPi.net 