Sculpting Polytopes

Sculpt displays a polytope, and in interactive mode, the left mouse button (de)selects pierce point(s), changing mode deselects pierce point(s), and the right mouse button switches modes with a menu. Mouse modes are rotation about the pierce point, translation of the pierce point, and rotating about the focal point. Roller button modes are rotation about the pierce point line of sight, scaling from the pierce point, driving forward to and back from the pierce point. Moving the operating system window also translates, so the model appears fixed behind the screen. Mouse and roller button modes are a matrix of submodes of transform mode. Nontransform modes are random refinement through the pierce point with roller button controlled cursor warp, additive sculpting above the pierce point, subtractive sculpting under the pierce point, and pinning two pierce points and moving a third pierce point by mouse and roller button.

Directory .script, or the -d directory, has numeric, space, embedding, and polytope representations saved, timestamped, classified by backlink automatically, and named manually. And .script, or the -d directory, has configurations such as light color and direction, picture plane position and directions, focal length, window position and size, and refine warp.

Option -i starts interactive mode, -e "script" loads a metric expression to periodically display heuristic animation, -d "dir" changes directory, -n "dir" initializes new directory with current state, -r randomizes the lighting -o "file" saves format by extension, -f "file" loads format by extension, -l "shape" replaces current by builtin shape, -t "ident" changes current by timestamp or name. Options are processed in order, so interactive sessions, animations, directory changes, initializations, loads, and saves can occur in any order. If .script or -d directory does not exist or is empty, it is created with regular tetrahedron, random lighting, and window centered on screen. It is an error for -n directory to exist, for -f file to not exist, or for -o file to exist. Errors are recoverable because directories contain history, and error messages contain instructions on how to recover.

The look and feel of sculpt is turn based. Even metric driven animation only updates the displayed vertices periodically. The rotations and such occur continuously through matrix multiplication, but the model remains rigid. Pin and move of plane is represented by wire frame, updating vertices and possibly faces only after action completion.

Supplemental features to sculpt include graffiti on faces, windows to other polytopes on faces, system calls and icons on faces, sockets to read-only polytopes on faces, jumping through faces to other polytopes, user authentication and kudos for various modifications to polytopes from requests through socket

Classifying Polytopes

The properties of polytopes that I chose to keep invariant are discontinuities, flatness, colinearity, and convexity. To indicate that two points on a polytope are colinear, or cohyperplanar, I collect the points into boundaries and intersections between boundaries, such that two points are coplanar iff they are in the same boundary. The discontinuities in a polytope occur only where boundaries intersect. To understand convexity, note that intersections between halfspaces are convex. Thus, if a discontinuity is concave, it consists of more than one halfspace intersection of the same intersecting boundaries. I call the halfspace intersections polyants, and specify them as maps from boundary to side. Thus, in an n dimensional space, a vertex has 2^n polyants, and an edge has 2^(n-1) polyants. If more than one polyant of a vertex has points near the vertex in the polytope, then the vertex is not convex, and similarly for edges, and so on. Note that the polytope has only the empty polyant, and the single boundaries each have two polyants. Wrt a boundary in its domain, a polyant is significant iff points in the polyant near the boundary are near points both in and not in the polytope. In fact, a two boundary polyant is significant iff one of the boundaries is significant in the section of the polytope by the other boundary. Thus, a polytope is a graph of polyants. Since a polyant is specified by boundaries and sides, and a graph is a map from polyant to set of polyant, equivalent polytopes are found by permuting the boundaries and mirroring sides across boundaries.