Deborah R. Fowler
Cuboctohedron
Posted June 30 2023Updated July 8 2023
keywords: redshift, maxon noise
Created in Houdini 19.5.303 LC and rendered in Redshift
Also on youtube at https://youtube.com/shorts/ZNMLS6F6isw
I called this short the Mysterious Midpoint Madness - The Cuboctahedron.
Inspired by a tweet by Idan Tal I was intrigue by the term "Cuboctohedron". I have always liked geometry, but had never come across this before. At first, being in the age of ChatGPT and being skeptical of the title I was curious to know if it was a made up term, but indeed it exists (fact checked beyond wiki). Cool! Some interesting properties as well as a history of use in art and architecture (see "The Geometry of Cuboctahedra in Medieval Art in Anatolia") - that shouldn't surprise me.
The tweet by Idan Tal shows the 4 hexagons embedded in the shape using Geogebra
https://twitter.com/MagicPi2/status/1672930013727817728?s=20
Looking further, the shape can be constructed by cutting the corners of a cube at their midpoints of their edges, but it can also be created using a similar technique on an Octahedron.
The definition of a Cuboctahedron is a polyhedron with 8 triangular faces and 6 square faces.
According to https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Cuboctahedron.html
it has been used in M.C. Escher's wood engravings.