The GNU 3DLDF Stellation Patterns Page

Author: Laurence D. Finston

This copyright notice applies to the text and source code of this web site, and the graphics that appear on it. The software described in this text has its own copyright notice and license, which can be found in the distribution itself.

Copyright (C) 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 The Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of this license is included in the file COPYING.TXT

Last updated: January 12, 2011

Table of Contents

Stellation Patterns

2011-1-14.
Added Stellation Pattern 1c. It has double lines and areas marked for cutting out so that resulting pattern can be used as a template for drawing.

The template should produce acceptable results for papercuts. Where precision is needed, such a template should not be used, but rather the drawing should be transferred using graphite paper.

Stellation Pattern 1c includes bridges to prevent the pattern from falling out of the surrounding material. I recommend the use of heavy paper. It might be possible to use light Bristol board, but cutting out might be difficult and the blades would dull quickly.

I've had poor results using thick Bristol board for this purpose; it was very difficult to cut out. I've had acceptable results using fairly heavy watercolor paper, however, it's soft and tends to dull the blades quickly. Paper will, of course, eventually wear out.

There are a couple of kinds of plastic available that might be suitable. However, I have only seen them in a catalogue for model-building supplies and have never seen the actual material.

2011-1-12.
Added the macro generate_star to the file stlltns.lmc. It's used to generate Stellation Pattern 1 and 1a. The latter version has double center lines.

2010-12-29.
The file stlltns.lmc (used by stlltn03.ldf) contains the definition of the macro generate_pattern, which can be used to create various patterns similar to the image above, depending on the parameters passed to it. These parameters determine the number and shape of the parallelograms and whether the outer circle of parallelograms is drawn.

Additional parameters could be defined to influence other features of the pattern, such as the relative distance between the parallelograms in each set of concentric parallelograms. The code could also be changed to make it possible to have quadrilaterals that aren't parallelograms, or other shapes.

GNU 3DLDF code for Patterns 1 and 3:	stlltn01.ldf
	stlltn03.ldf
Macro file, required by stlltn03.ldf:	stlltns.lmc
MetaPost code for Pattern 2:	stlltn02.mp
TeX code (including all patterns):	stlltns.txt
PostScript file:	stlltns.ps
PDF file:	stlltns.pdf
Compressed (gzipped) PostScript file:	stlltns.ps.gz
Compressed (gzipped) PDF file:	stlltns.pdf.gz