gevvvvv / polyhedronisme

An html5+coffeescript tool to construct and explore polyhedra.

polyHédronisme

This is a project built to demonstrate the Conway Polyhedral Operators and their extensions by George W. Hart. It was heavily inspired by some old code of George Hart's that did much the same in VRML. Additional operators are being added to increase the range of procedurally generated forms possible.

One derives any of a vast family of polyhedral shapes by specifying a core geometric 'seed' and then modifying it with topological and geometrical operators that derive more complex shapes from this base set.

It should runs on any modern canvas-enabled browser.

This project was also inspired by the renaissance tome Perspectiva Corporum Regularium featuring engravings by Jost Amman after designs and drawings by Wenzel Jamnitzer.

It is written in coffeescript. Uses jQuery, underscore, PEG.js parser for parsing recipes, and Eli Grey's BlobBuilder, FileSaver, canvas-toBlob for saving files.

Future

• Switch rendering to Three.JS
• WebGL frontend to replace the hand-rolled, slow canvas renderer, for those browsers that can use it.
• 2d vector export to SVG
• integration of csg.js lib for complex mesh joins
• geometric distortion operators, i.e.:

G x**2,y**2,z**2 => poly.xyz = _.map(poly.xyz, ([x,y,z]) -> [x*x,y*y,z*z])

• Simple boolean operations on like-numbered faces: "cut and glue"
• proper touch event handling for mobile

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Text CC-BY, Code MIT License 2011 Anselm Levskaya