Friday, September 18, 2009

More polytopal animations

I was inspired by a still image from the Wikipedia entry on the 24-cell to make an animation of rotating and then stereographically projecting the 24-cell, showing the images of the original polytope edges. Math on Wikipedia is pretty spotty, but the polytope entries have really become top-notch in the last few years.
Here's a still from the animation:



and a medium and small resolution version of the animation:

small (300x300, 6 MB)
medium (512x512, 17 MB).

Thursday, September 3, 2009

600-cell animations

Over the last year or so, when I have time, I've been trying to fine tune ray-traced animations of polytopes (using Sage, Tachyon, ffmpeg, and cddlib). My latest effort was to do a loop of Schlegel projections of the beautiful 600-cell. The 600-cell is one of the six regular polytopes in 4 dimensions; its usually considered the 4D analog of the icosahedron. Here's a still from my animation:



Since Blogger's re-encoding butchers my movies, I will just post links. Here are four sizes:

small (320x200, 3.5 MB)
medium (640x400, 7 MB)
large (1280x800, 13 MB)
large, high-res (1280x800, 33 MB).