Stars, 5th of April 2015.

All sorts of things come to one's mind while walking through graveyard. During recent walks through Mirogoj cemetery, I concluded that the five-pointed star that I often saw in gravestones is not a "well defined" polygon since it appears in many variations. Then, while walking next to graves of Norbert Veber, Vladimir Nazor, Josip Kolumbo, Ivica Račan, Edo Murtić ... I thought of how to define it and I concluded that for that purpose I need a single parameter (see below).

Today I played a little bit with the idea, just to convince me that I still haven't forgotten to code in PovRay, after I surprised myself with some ancient and very complex works of mine ( >> cloister).

The same algorithm, used for five-pointed stars, can be applied to stars with different number of points, e.g. to three-pointed stars. The shape in the upper left corner in the image above looks a bit like Mercedes logo.

In PovRAY such shapes can be defined in #macro routines. My quick routine is initialized by the number of points of a star and the parameter defining the star "slimness" (between 0 - slim and 1 - fat).

The object which remind of military rank stars are pyramids - the base reduces to a point as the height increases. In PovRAY one can produce such an object using #prism with conical sweep.

Wikipedia has an article on >> star polygons, but they are obviously a subset of those shown here.

<< Hall of fame: Cloister

Hello Earth haiku >>

Last updated on 7th of April 2015.