I was inspired by Andy Cocker's "Max Trace Magic", so I made this. What you are
looking at is -not- a dodecahedron, even though it looks a lot like one. The
camera is inside a reflective tetrahedron, and there are 4 cylinders protruding
from the center of each face of the tetrahedron and meeting in the middle. The
small image shows you the scene from a different point of view with the
reflections turned off.

The illusion of a dodecahedron is caused by the fact that the angles between
faces in a tetrahedron is nearly the same as the angle between points on a
dodecahedron, so the reflections form an image that nearly looks like a
dodecahedron.

-- 
Tek
http://www.evilsuperbrain.com

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Attachments:
Download 'diamond mirror.jpg' (149 KB) Download 'diamond overview.jpg' (5 KB)

Preview of image 'diamond mirror.jpg'

Preview of image 'diamond overview.jpg'

Cool idea, you used colored mirrors, didn't you ?
Did you try with a rounded tetrahedron ? That would give smoother 
transition from one plane to another ...

JC

Tek wrote:
> I was inspired by Andy Cocker's "Max Trace Magic", so I made this. What you are
> looking at is -not- a dodecahedron, even though it looks a lot like one. The
> camera is inside a reflective tetrahedron, and there are 4 cylinders protruding
> from the center of each face of the tetrahedron and meeting in the middle. The
> small image shows you the scene from a different point of view with the
> reflections turned off.
> 
> The illusion of a dodecahedron is caused by the fact that the angles between
> faces in a tetrahedron is nearly the same as the angle between points on a
> dodecahedron, so the reflections form an image that nearly looks like a
> dodecahedron.
> 
>

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> Cool idea, you used colored mirrors, didn't you ?

Yes I did.

> Did you try with a rounded tetrahedron ? That would give smoother
> transition from one plane to another ...

I thought the same thing, though I couldn't get the right effect. Simply
smoothing off the corners wouldn't work because the 2 bits of the dodecahedron
that nearly meet up are actually reflections in completely different directions
(any 2 mirrors in the tetrahedron are at an angle sharper than 90 degrees), so
smoothing between them would get a reflection of lots of other things between
the two.

So instead I replaced each face of the tetrahedron with a sphere, but after much
adjusting I couldn't line up the edges exactly. However I did stumble across
this much more interesting pattern (which is now my desktop wallpaper!) :)

-- 
Tek
http://www.evilsuperbrain.com

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Attachments:
Download 'diamondtree.jpg' (111 KB)

Preview of image 'diamondtree.jpg'

Woowww, that does it, nice view !

Tek wrote:
>>Cool idea, you used colored mirrors, didn't you ?
> 
> 
> Yes I did.
> 
> 
>>Did you try with a rounded tetrahedron ? That would give smoother
>>transition from one plane to another ...
> 
> 
> I thought the same thing, though I couldn't get the right effect. Simply
> smoothing off the corners wouldn't work because the 2 bits of the dodecahedron
> that nearly meet up are actually reflections in completely different directions
> (any 2 mirrors in the tetrahedron are at an angle sharper than 90 degrees), so
> smoothing between them would get a reflection of lots of other things between
> the two.
> 
> So instead I replaced each face of the tetrahedron with a sphere, but after much
> adjusting I couldn't line up the edges exactly. However I did stumble across
> this much more interesting pattern (which is now my desktop wallpaper!) :)
> 
>

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