Robert Inventor

Prev Virtual Flower Star Spheres Next

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You can click and drag on this animation to turn it around. To see more star spheres, visit the star sphere animations page

To get these, you start with a geometrical shape, here a cube. Then replace the faces of the cube by stars, or any other shape you like. You can then animate them.

To do this in Virtual flower, you can use the new Star Sphere wizard. Choose a geometrical shape from a very long list of options. Then click the button to make it into a star sphere. Then you can configure the shapes of the stars - with five preset shapes to get you started, some parameters you can adjust, or change the shape by moving the points that outline the star.

Here is the wizard in action, to make another star sphere:

To find this feature in Virtual Flower, go to Wizards | Star Sphere Wizard.

To make a star sphere - you select an geometrical shape from the drop lists first. Then you click on the Make Object button. Then click on Make star sphere from faces. Finally you edit the stars. Choose Which star to change, (1 or 2 in this case) - here it is set to change the second star, the one with three points in the figure. Then you can choose between five preset stars for each type of star. You can vary the parameters for the star - here the Star indentation is the main thing. The star copies makes two or more copies of the original star rotated around so from a three point star with two copies, you get a six point star, and so on. The turns for the star parameter also affects the shape. You can also just drag on the pink dots in the picture of the selected star, to change its shape.

You can click on the colours to vary the colour of each star - here there are only two stars so only the first two colours are relevant. If there are more than four stars (rare), you can easily increase the number of colours in the bar below.

Here is the starting object for that same star sphere:

This shows just one side of it.

It's the octahemioctahedron, which has eight triangular faces joined together with four hexagons.

I know it looks like eight triangular based pyramids joined together - but you are supposed to think of it rather as made up of hexagons. One of them is easy to pick out in this screen shot if you just follow the six sides around the outside of the picture, the hexagon then joins those together and cuts right through the middle of the shape. You ignore all the places where the hexagons cross over each other. Can you see the positions for the other three?

You can get this shape from an octahedron (which has four triangles meeting at each corner),

First you cut off all the corners to get a cuboctahedron (which has triangles and squares, two of each meeting at each corner).

If you then remove all the the square faces of the cuboctahedron,

and then rejoin its triangles using hexagons spanning across the centre of the figure, this is what results..

You can get to the cuboctahedron in another way, by cutting off the corners of a cube, then proceed as before.

With this way of thinking of things, you ignore all the places where the faces cut across each other, and only look at the places where they meet along their edges. So, thinking that way, this shape is made of four hexagons and six triangles. Each corner (vertex) has two of each meeting at that point. So it is what mathematicians call a "semi-regular solid" because all its vertices have the same pattern of faces joined together in the same way (here the faces around each vertex alternate as triangle, hexagon, triangle, hexagon) - and it has dips in the surface - so non convex - so it is a non convex semi-regular solid.

As you may notice on the screen shot, Virtual Flower also has an object wizard. There is a big list of starting objects you can choose from, and then you can modify them in various ways.

Freeware / Shareware status: This feature is shareware for star spheres that use many "stars".

To read more about Virtual Flower, go on to:

Geometrical Shapes

To get the program with many more shapes, download and install Virtual Flower.

The program comes with a generous Free Test drive with all the features completely unlocked (start the test drive at any time):

Download Virtual Flower

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