Polyhedron Animation
A cube, a tetrahedron and an octahedron drawn, stacked and locked together in a thirty second study of geometric formation.
Polyhedron Animation is a short study in geometric formation, written in Python with NumPy and animated with the 3D toolkit of Matplotlib. It begins with a single wireframe cube and draws, edge by edge, the tetrahedron that rests on four of its corners and the octahedron that joins the centers of its faces. The octahedron then turns through a Rodrigues rotation until one of its edges lies along an edge of the tetrahedron, and the set is copied sideways and lifted into four stacked layers.
As the stack rises, alternate layers slide until the corners of the tetrahedra meet the corners of the octahedra, locking the two solids into one continuous lattice, the pairing that fills space in an octet truss. The cubes that set everything out turn to dotted lines and withdraw, leaving only the tetrahedra and octahedra, whose faces fill with translucent color while the camera circles the form. Every stage is timed by frame and eased with a smoothstep curve, so all thirty seconds of motion come from about two hundred lines of vector math.