suggestions for improvement

[Whogius]

been collecting some ideas for improving stella lately.

some suggestions

1) truncation , i could not find a way to truncate a polyhedron. (or did i overlook an optiom.... again)

2) same for the other "conway transformations": rectification, birectification.
and all the others.

3) Moravian stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravian_star
from the wikipedia article: There are other stars with 20, 32, 50, 62 and 110 points that are commonly hand-made. not sure how they are all made, but should be in stella


4 ) Uniform polyhedron compounds:
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_p ... n_compound

[robertw]

(1) You can use Stella's "Morph Duals by Truncation" view, adjust to the truncation you want, then use the left-and-down arrow button at the top of that view to make it the new base model. You can also use "Options->Set Dual Morphing Ratio" to set an exact point, but you'd need to work out where that is. There's no specific feature for truncation though at the moment. You could also subdivide faces and use faceting mode to create a truncated model.

(2) Conway operations are something I started working on, but it needs a lot more work and won't make it into the next release.

(3) Moravian stars. I think you could make all these easily enough. Start with any Archimedean solid, augment all the faces with long pyramids. After the first face type, you can use the "Pyramid height: Touch model radius" option to make all the subsequent ones stretch to the same radius.

(4) Unifrom compounds. Many of these are already in Stella's Compounds section, and some others are easily made via "Poly->Add Model to Mirror Image". Looks like that would cover most of them? But I guess it wouldn't hurt to add a dedicated Uniform Compound section. Won't worry for now. Sometime I would like to add a Compound View though which would make compounds easy to create and view, even the ones with rotational freedom. Definitely not for the next release though.

[Whogius]

thanks for your reply.

bit puzzelled by your remark

(1) You can use Stella's "Morph Duals by Truncation" view, adjust to the truncation you want, then use the left-and-down arrow button at the top of that view to make it the new base model.

how does "make it the new base model" work ( sorry just clicking the left button changes the base polygon (to the previous platonic solid), and clicking the arrow hook down 2 truncates the truncated model again. ) i probably do something wrong

(4) Unifrom compounds. Many of these are already in Stella's Compounds section, and some others are easily made via "Poly->Add Model to Mirror Image".

tried to make a compound of two dodecahedra (just as tryout, didnt check if it was in the compounds section) but "Poly->Add Model to Mirror Image" was greyed out for some reason. (maybe because i didn't set a mirror but then how to do that?)

[robertw]

(1) No, the sigle left-and-down button in the top right corner of the morph view. It's available on many views, and makes whatever's in that view the new base model.



(4) "Poly->Add Model to Mirror Image" only applies to chiral polyhedra. Models that don't already have a reflection symmetry can be combined with the mirror image. The 2 dodecahedron compound is already in the library.