Stella Tutorial: Replacing polyhedra in a compound
Using
Great Stella
or
Stella4D,
here's a way to replace each polyhedron within a compound with a new model,
thus making a brand new compound. The steps are as follows, or see the video
below.
Use "Poly→Keep One Part of Compound" (or Ctrl+K) to
separate out one part of a compound
Put it in a memory slot ("Edit→Put in Memory" or type
"m1")
Do whatever editing you want (e.g. augment or stellate the polyhedron)
Add the result to the unedited item in memory ("Edit→Add/Blend from
Memory")
Select a face of the original unedited part
Put this new model in a memory slot
Re-open the compound you started with
Augment this model using the item in memory ("Poly→Augment
Polyhedron" or hit "a") and select to extract from all faces of
the same type. You should also select Inherit colors from augmented
faces to ensure your compound has the same colours as the original.
This should subtract off the original parts, and add the new parts in a
symmetrical fashion.
For the specific case in the video, a shorter way would simply be to augment
all faces of the compound directly. However the method above allows for more
general substitutions, such as replacing an icosahedron in a compound of
icosahedra with any of its stellations.