The stars on the pentagonal faces were drawn using Geometer’s Sketchpad and MS-Paint. The icosidodecahedron itself was created using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator, which you can try for free at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
There’s one icosidodecahedron at the center of this cluster, with more icosidodecahedra attached to each of the central figure’s 32 faces. In the first version, the coloring is simply based as the number of sides for each face.
In the next picture, the coloring is by face-type (position in the overall cluster).
The last image shown here has the cluster in “rainbow color mode.”
I used Stella 4d to make these — a program you may try for free right here.
To make these three rotating cluster-polyhedra, I started with one icosidodecahedron in the center, then augmented each of its 32 faces with overlapping, additional icosidodecahedra, for a total of 33 icosidodecahedra per cluster. In the first image, only two colors are used: one for the triangular faces, and another for the pentagons. The second version, however, has the colors assigned by face-type, which is determined by each face’s placement in the overall cluster.
For the third version, I simply put Stella 4d (the program I use to make these images) into “rainbow color mode.” If you’d like to give Stella 4d a try, you can do so for free at this website.
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.
Software credit: see http://www.software3d.com/stella.php — free trial download available.
