I began writing the Hedron Tools utilities to assist in the interchange and sharing of polyhedra models in various formats.
Later I expanded it to enhance vrml, giving control of texturing, smoothing, and coloring.
These utilities were written to operate on Hedron
and Stella files. The following are
presently command line utilities.
addtxtr - Add Texture. This allows one to add textures or colorize vrml files in various ways. Almost any graphics file can be used and there are also almost 500 builtin colors. Hedron can build a vrml with wire frame consisting of vertices and "cylinders" which can also be texturized. Try setting the Cylinder size to 5 and the Vertex size to 8 in Hedron for a rather pleasing wire frame.
off2txt - Converts a Stella OFF file to a Hedron input text file.
offangle - Finds the angle at any vertex in relation to two other vertices. Hedron can be used to build polyhedra from the ground up. Usually "Vertex Labeling" is used to identify the vertices while constructing it. I wrote utility this to find what polygon might fit next during this process. The reason I read an OFF file is because Hedron is capable of generating OFF files. Those OFF files can be used even if they are in an incomplete state but will always contain coordinates.
smoothvr - Adds a "smooth" statement to a Stella or Hedron vrml file.
srconv - Takes the output from the Sphere Repulsion Java Applet at: http://members.ozemail.com.au/~llan/mpol.html and creates a Hedron input file or a Stella OFF file from it.
transcol - Transfers the color table from one vrml file to another. This way it is possible to transfer the colors Stella uses into a vrml crated by Hedron and vice versa.
vrml2txt - Creates a Hedron input file or a Stella OFF file from vrml created by
either of those applications.
Installation is done by unzipping the utilities you want into a directory in your
path. Often this is simply the Windows directory. My own preference has been to
create a C:\bin directory and place them there, but then I had to add that
directory to my path. In XP this is done under Control Panel / System and is not
straight forward. Please see Microsoft Documentation as to how to do it.
If you get an error that MSVCR80.DLL library file is missing you need to install .NET 2.0
The Microsoft Power Tool "Open Command Window Here" is helpful. It can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
All of the utilities will show their usage format by just entering the name of the
utility on the command line. Also, the individual documentation of each utility
contains the usage format.
Author: Roger Kaufman
PolyhedraSmith@gmail.com
History:
2024-06-17 Use base.css
2019-03-12 Changed email address from defunct bigfoot.com
2006-11-29 Initial Release