Mimicking the Wenninger Color Combinations with Great Stella

[TomF]

I've only made 12 polyhedra so far, all of them using the directions in Polyhedron Models. I've decided that I like his coloring choices. Maybe I'm just missing something obvious, but the color patterns that I've been able to get in Great Stella seem to emulate Wenninger's. Is there some simple way to do this? I'm not referring to which colors I should use but to how to get each of the facial planes to be a uniform color while not having two planes of the same color meeting at an edge.

[robertw]

Stella doesn't have some kind of intelligent colour selection to avoid the same colours sharing an edge, but it does have several of the standard colouring arrangements Wenninger used built in.

The "Color" menu has two submenus related to the overall colour arrangement. The first one "Basic Color Scheme" you can probably just leave set as "Auto Color". The second one "Special Color Arrangements" lets you choose some specific colour schemes which act on top of this. Eg "Icosahedral Arrangement 1 (5 colors)" will use a 5-colour scheme for faces lying in the same planes as an icosahedron, in this case based on how a compound of 5 tetrahedra would be coloured.

There's standard colourings for a number of other polyhedra too. You can try the different ones to see which one gives the best colouring.