good catch! I forgot to put the "regular faces" part because everything in the app so far is regular faced. I was trying to make a definition of "vertex transitive" that's intelligible for someone without a math background but I obviously have a bit to go! I'll update the text based on your comments.
1. The source code is here: https://github.com/tesseralis/polyhedra-viewer, under the MIT license.
2. Both! I do have a catalog of the polyhedra (adapted from http://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/vp.html). Some of the operations, like truncation, are done parametrically, but others, like expansion, I "cheated" and relied on knowing what the result is b/c I was just too lazy to figure out the math.
3. I don't think so. The primary focus is the relationships between the regular faced polyhedra, so only the operations that keep you within this particular set. Unfortunately you can only truncate something once before the faces become non-regular.
4. I know right??? First I need to figure out how to VR... shrug
Yeah, generic Wythoff and Conway operators are wild... I'm still not sure I fully understand them. Maybe your thing can help me eventually ^^
Maybe my thing can help me eventually! Most of the clever code is from elsewhere and I need to brush up on some fundamental maths to really understand it. I've ended up with two different mesh representations which I convert between (one for the base Wythoff stuff and the other for applying Conway operators). Ideally I'd rewrite one of the other to get rid of this.
You do start to get awesome results by just fiddling with different chains of operators so I'd love to wrap that part in a nice UI and release it as a toy. It is of course very easy to end up with way too many polygons as most operators double the count at the very least.
I'm very jealous of some aspects of your app. I might need to borrow some ideas... :-)
Polyhedra Viewer: app to explore the relationships and transformations between various convex polyhedra.
This has been a passion project of mine for the last six months (with different versions going back further!) It's partially inspired by George W Hart's virtual polyhedra (http://www.georgehart.com/virtual-polyhedra/vp.html) I wanted to make something accessible and beautiful, since a lot of the resources that already exist aren't very friendly to people not already obsessed with polyhedra.
I'm still (sort of) working on it, so suggestions and comments are welcome!
I immediately tried to construct my favorite obscure polyhedron (the rhombic dodecahedron) and found I simply could not take the dual of the cuboctahedron! :P
That aside, this is a really fantastic little toy here - I'd never really understood the relationships between all these shapes before, or exactly what some of these operations were, geometrically speaking.
> favorite obscure polyhedron (the rhombic dodecahedron)
Obscure? Come on! The rhombic dodecahedron is the Voronoi cell of the FCC lattice, making it (arguably) the most natural 3-dimensional analog of the hexagon. It shows up all over the place!
It's "obscure" to me (and also my favorite) because I had never even heard of it before I tried to find out what the most natural 3-dimensional analog of the hexagon was. :)
