The Two Nucleic Symmetries of Rhombohedral Tessellation

It was discovered through play that by wrapping the outlying vertices of a group of tessellated Rhombic Dodecahedra with a convex hull, an approximation of a Truncated Octahedron was produced.  Upon further investigation, it was discovered that an approximation of a Rhombic Dodecahedron emerged by wrapping the outlying vertices of a group of tessellated Truncated Octahedra with a convex hull.

The Rhombic Dodecahedron and its Strange Twin

A space-filling polyhedron is one that can be used to generate a tessellation in space. That means that by duplicating and translating (not rotating) the shape, we can create a three-dimensional tiling that leaves no gaps between its constituent shapes. This is of course easy to visualize with a cube; things begin to get both messy and interesting when you explore tessellations with other non-platonic space-filling shapes. And so began my brief but exciting journey into the lands of the Rhombic Dodecahedron.

Propagating Orbital Bodies in Unity Gaming Engine

For the past few months, we have been working on generating an orbital hierarchy of a solar system. We then took this abstract hierarchy and ascribed it with a set of Keplerian Orbital Elements. Finally, we used these orbital elements to build up hard position and velocity data for our orbital bodies. We now have everything we need in order to render and propagate these orbital bodies in Unity Gaming Engine.

Interaction with the Icosphere; Live Software Demo

At this point in our development of the Icosphere, we can render our Abstract Icosphere. We can recurse the Icosphere uniformly and non-uniformly. Additionally, we can detect an "observation region" of configurable radius. In this post, we'll tie together all of the work we've done so far in order to make our Icosphere interactive. I've also put together a live, video software demo of the Icospherical World Model.