Publisher's Description
From Robert Webb:
Great Stella is the ultimate polyhedron program, letting you create a huge range of polyhedra, rotate them in 3D on-screen, and print nets so you can build your own paper models. Images can be displayed on a polyhedron's faces and printed on the nets (try photos of your pets). Models provided include the uniform polyhedra (Platonic, Archimedean, Kepler-Poinsot, prisms/antiprisms), Johnson solids, 'Near Misses', Stewart toroids, compounds, geodesic domes, and many more. Duals of all polyhedra are available, and all models can be stellated, faceted, zonohedrified or augmented/excavated/drilled leading to trillions of new polyhedra. See cross-sections, and stellation diagrams. Export models as DXF, POV-Ray, VRML, OBJ or OFF, and imported from OFF format. Morph between any polyhedron and its dual using one of six different techniques. And if you have red-blue glasses, you can see it all in 3D. Geometry lovers should check out Stella4D too.
What's new in this version: Version 4.4 updated in-code links to reflect new email and website, and other minor improvements.
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All versions:
4.9 starsout of 10 votes
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Current version:
5.0 starsout of 1 votes
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"Stella is my favourite way to play with polyhedra!"
Version: Great Stella 4.4
Pros
It does most of what I want a polyhedron tool to do (and a whole lot of other things that I haven't got round to playing with yet). It makes it easy to create polyhedra that I'd never seen or heard of - makes math dreams into virtual reality!
Cons
Sometimes Stella crashes on me when I'm asking it to do really wierd things. I can usually find a workaround, though. Sometimes I think it might be nice to have even more control over some details -- well, Rob always reads next-version email tips.
Summary
Even if your love is for making real polyhedra you can hold and turn in your hands, this is a great tool to use on your way there. It lets you see the shapes you've been thinking of, turn them, cut them, stellate them -- whatever! -- and then it can print your nets for you.
Starting to use any math program can be a little wierd -- polyhedra aren't very much like words, so no polyhedra program can ever use your regular word-processing set of menues. Still, after a little while I was in there and playing. At first I thought Stella's manual skipped too many details, but Rob who wrote the program is a great believer in finding things out for yourself -- sort of Crocodile Dundee attitude, you're a resourceful loner in the great Australian Outback and you can make it if you try -- but I've come to accept his way of handling the manual. He gives you enough tips to get you going in the direction you want to go, and you can fiddle with his menues until you find how to do what you'd like to do. Stella is small and fast -- you can open several instances simultaneously, so you can have one with your "serious" window and a few others to fool around in finding out which submenu does what.
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