Tag: polyhedron software

Create Polyhedra with Antiprism

Math Software, Teaching Tools

Last year, I shared about Archimedean, a user-friendly software in exploring solids and polyhedra.  If you want to create polyhedra with a little bit of challenge, you may want to try Antiprism.  Antiprism is a set of command line programs for working with polyhedra. There are programs to create, transform, analyze, and visualize polyhedra.


An extensive collection of polyhedra is included, many accessible by name: Platonic, Archimedean, Catalan, Johnson, uniform, prisms, antiprisms, pyramids, cuppolas, trapezohedra, uniform compounds, isohedral deltahedra, geodesic spheres.

The Antiview viewer allows a model to be inspected using various options, including a display of a model’s symmetry. The models may be exported to POV-Ray for producing high quality images, or to VRML for viewing on-line.

The programs are easily combined in scripts, making it easy to generate a series of models, or frames for an animation.

The Windows package is freely downloadable and freely redistributable. A source package is provided for users of other systems.

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Explore Solids with Archimedean

Resources and Freebies, Web 2.0 Technology

Archimedean is great geometric tool I discovered recently via the Facebook page of GeoGebra.  It is a tool for exploring polyhedral shapes. It is capable of transforming (e.g. truncating the solid’s corners or edges), and analyzing (e.g. showing the lines of symmetry or inscribed radius). Archimedean also allows the user to change the colors and other propoerties of the investigated solids.

Archimedean was created by Raffi J. Kasparian. It is very similar to Poly, another software for investigating solids.

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Investigating Polyhedrons with Poly

High School Geometry, Resources and Freebies, Teaching Tools, Web 2.0 Technology

Poly is a program for investigating polyhedral shapes. Poly can display polyhedral shapes in three main ways:

  • as a three-dimensional image,
  • as a flattened, two-dimensional net, and
  • as a topological embedding in the plane

The three-dimensional images may be interactively rotated and folded/unfolded. Physical models may be produced by printing out the flattened two-dimensional net, cutting around its perimeter, folding along the edges, and finally taping together neighboring faces.

Using Poly is fairly intuitive, so there is no need to post a tutorial about it. You can download Poly here.

Note: The text above was copied from the Poly readme file.

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