software3d.com

I really love Stella and Zometool, so it would be even better together! Would there be a way to make a zometool style for the edges (like the existing geomag)?
Along the same lines (pun intended!), could there be an option to color edges based on vector, not just same type?
Thanks for making such a great program.

Zometool rendering is an interesting idea, but probably won't happen. I just don't have the time unless there's a huge interest in it, which I suspect there isn't.

If I understand your second question correctly, then you can already achieve this with "Color->Edge Colors->Color Edges Same If Parallel".

If you want to display edges using cylinders then you also have to make sure the cylinder colour is set to match the line colour. To do this, go to "Display->Vertex & Edge Options->Sphere and Cylinder Options" and set "Cylinder Material" to "Same color as lines".

Thanks for your response. While the parallel option is useful, it's not exactly what I was asking about. I guess vector wasn't the right word, I meant all the edges that share the same direction in the symmetry system, like a zometool direction. So all edges of same type would be included plus any other types that share that "direction".

I don't see how the word direction makes sense here. Sounds like maybe you just mean all edges of the same length. Is that right? I think Zome rods are the same colour if they're the same length. But yes I don't currently have an option for that.

It's not really same length, because zometool has various lengths for each color (sized based on golden ratio).
Direction isn't really the right mathematical term, it's just what the zometool people use. It's referring to all the lines that can be made from any given point that can be superimposed with a symmetry rotation (in zometool its all icosahedral symmetry). So for example any line going from the center of a uniform polyhedron to a vertex would all share the same "direction". Also the edges of any uniform polyhedron (I'm not sure about the snubs), if you look at any vertex the edges coming out all share a common "direction". It's like same type but a greater inclusion of all length edges the can be created with the current symmetry from any vertex in the polyhedron.
I'm not sure if that all made sense.

There's a description about what the colours represent here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zome#Char ... f_Zometool

One problem is that many shapes couldn't be made with Zometools because the edges wouldn't lie in the required directions. I guess there could be an additional colour for these. But really this kind of colouring is probably only of interest to Zometool users, so probably not worth thinking about unless I also look into a full Zometool rendering mode. I'm not even sure if I could do that without running into trouble with the creators.

There's an open-source program to model with zometool called vzome: http://vzome.com/home/ but it's not nearly as powerful as Stella and has very limited features.