Controls & views

Three views of one selection, and each view works at its own scale: the solid adds and removes one cell, the diagram toggles the cell on either side of its plane, and the Cells table — only the Cells table — moves whole supporting sets.

The gestures, per view

View	`shift` + click	`ctrl` + click
solid	Add the one cell sitting on the clicked face.	Remove the one cell behind it.
diagram	Toggle the cell beneath the plane — the one this region caps.	Toggle the cell resting on it, above the plane.
Cells table	Either modifier: toggle the box together with its whole supporting set — on if it was off, down to the core; off if it was on. A bare click toggles just the box.

Why the difference: in the two graphical views you are pointing at a place, and the natural unit there is the single cell on one side of it. The group operation — a cell with everything supporting it — needs the table, where the support structure is actually visible. The colours say which is which: green adds and red removes in the solid; the diagram's toggles are gold for beneath and blue for above, because there a click is a toggle, not an add or a remove.

The three views

All three show one selection of cells. Editing in any of them changes the other two immediately, because there is only ever one selection.

1 · The solid

What the thing looks like.

drag — turn it
scroll — zoom
shift-click a face — add the cell just outside it
ctrl-click a face — remove the cell just inside it

You are always pointing at a face, which has a cell on each side. Shift takes the one further out, ctrl the one further in — one cell at a time, so you grow and carve exactly at the surface you can see.

2 · The diagram

One face plane, cut by all the others.

drag — pan
scroll — zoom about the pointer
double-click — reset the view
shift-click a region — toggle the cell beneath it
ctrl-click — toggle the cell on top of it

This is the classic stellation diagram, and it draws the surface of the solid, not its volume. A region filled solid is a face looking outward; a region filled very pale is a face looking inward, lining a cavity. Pale therefore means there is a hole behind it.

3 · The Cells table

Every cell there is, whether or not you can see it.

click — toggle one cell
click a row number — the whole layer
drag, wheel or the scrollbars — move about a wide table
ctrl-click a box — toggle it with its whole supporting set (this view only)

Rows are shells with the core at the bottom, each built on the one below. A box is a set of cells the symmetry carries onto one another; a shaded group splits into sub-cells, which is where handedness lives. The full walkthrough →

The panel

core · + layer · all · clear: Walk outward a shell at a time. core alone is the original polyhedron; core + one layer is its first stellation.
fit: Rescale so the current selection fills the frame. The scale is otherwise left alone while you work, so adding a shell does not shrink everything you have already built.
polyhedron / stellation symmetry: The first is the symmetry the cells are grouped under; the second, which must be a subgroup of it, is the symmetry the finished stellation is required to keep. Lowering the second splits each group into sub-cells — that is what lets you take one hand of a chiral pair. Only genuine subgroups of the solid's own point group are offered.
build out to N shells: How far out to carry the arrangement. Chosen per solid; raise it if shift-click reports nothing further out.
diagram face: Which face's plane the diagram is drawn on. Only faces the chosen symmetry cannot carry onto one another are listed — the rest would give the same picture.
symmetry elements: The group's rotation axes, mirror planes and rotoreflection axes, drawn as solid geometry through the origin so the stellation hides what is behind them. Inequivalent elements get different colours; the legend names each class, and mark on the diagram shows where the same elements meet the diagram's plane.
Make planes…: Stellate an arbitrary set of planes instead of a catalog solid — the original program's plane editor. One plane per line, each optionally multiplied by a symmetry group; the sheet can be seeded from the current solid's own face planes, and saves into the JSON document.

A JavaScript port of the Stellation applet written by Vladimir Bulatov between 1998 and 2001. See the Cells walkthrough for what the table means, the history for where these solids come from, and what changed for the current round of work.