Can i make semitransparent faces for any color?

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demihra
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Can i make semitransparent faces for any color?

Post by demihra » Sat Dec 21, 2013 12:56 pm

Hi,
Help anybody!
Can i make animated polyhedra with semitransparent faces for any color in Stella4D? If it's possible then how?

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robertw
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Post by robertw » Sun Dec 22, 2013 2:20 am

Animated in what way? Stella4D can export videos of various animations, such as rotating, morphing between duals, nets folding and unfolding, and animating 4D cross-sections, as well as "Tours" which allow you to create sequences of such animations into longer animations, with animated transitions between each polyhedron.

Stella4D does not yet support semi-transparent faces as such, however you can apply images to faces and the image may have transparency, so the work-around for now is to create a solid white image with a partly transparent alpha channel. You can tell it to mix the face colour with the image colour, allowing you to still control face colour.

It won't always be guaranteed that transparency will be rendered correctly though. Mostly it is, but when faces intersect, for example, it won't be quite right. It's a difficult and computationally expensive problem to solve perfectly, but it will get it right for the most part.

demihra
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Joined: Thu Dec 19, 2013 4:07 pm

Re:Can i make semitransparent faces for any color?

Post by demihra » Sun Dec 22, 2013 12:31 pm

Thanks.

I would do Animating GIF, same picture on the link http://mathforum.org/mathimages/index.p ... eract1.gif,
using only your great program.
Can I do it?

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robertw
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Post by robertw » Sun Dec 22, 2013 1:05 pm

You can't apply images to 4D models, so at the moment you wouldn't be able to do the transparency. You can just use the edges and vertices though, such as in the animation made using Stella4D below:

Image

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