Sliced Solids

I made a program that computes several sections of a geometric solid and prints them. You can take this sections (pieces) and assemble them to make your own sliced solid

You can use:
VLC media player to watch .FLV files.
Cortona Viewer to watch .VRML files.
Adobe's Acrobat Reader to view or print .PDF files.

Version 1.0

The first solid I sliced was a torus. The first version of the program made a rough aproximation that you can see here:

pieces PDF 220KB
video flv1.6 MB

If you want to make your own sliced torus, follow the link to "pieces".
Print this file in card twice, cut out the pieces, and assemble them. Number the pieces and mark them left or right as needed.

It can be difficult to assemble this one... It was just a test.

Version 2.0

Version 2.0 of my program worked better. If you can approximate a solid with a polyhedron, the program takes this polyhedron and slices it.

The program can also label the notches and creates a PostScript file with the pieces. Sorrowfully, it prints one piece per page. I used Corel Draw to regroup the pieces in a single PDF document with several pieces printed by page.

Tetrahedron

I sliced a tetraedron to test my program. The program worked fine but my computation did not forsee that some pieces have only one notch, and this makes difficult get these pieces aligned properly.

Tetrahedron, take 0 Tetrahedron, take 1 Tetrahedron, take 2

Tetrahedron, take 3 Tetrahedron, take 4

Of course, you can get here the PDF file to build your sliced tetrahedron.

Torus, version 2

I sliced the torus again. Here you can see the results:

model PDF (35 KB)
model VRML (234 KB)
model PNG (35 KB)
pieces PDF (104KB)
video FLV (9.5MB)

Click on the images to enlarge them 5x5 times:

Torus v2, take 1 Torus v2, take 2

Torus v2, take 3 Torus v2, take 4

Knot 5

I also computed a knot and then sliced it. The image below points to the Virtual Reality file that you can watch with the Cortona Viewer.

model PDF (110 KB)
model VRML (460 KB)
model PNG (72 KB)
pieces PDF
video FLV 7.5MB

This solid will require a LOT of patience and a well tempered mind. Some pieces seem to be wrongly labeled, they are not. Keep in mind that the slices may have several parts.

Click on the images to enlarge them 5x5 times.

Knot5, take 0 Knot5, take 1

Knot5, take 2

Knot 3

model PDF (111 KB)
model VRML (723 KB)
model PNG (62 KB)
pieces PDF
video FLV 7.5MB

Click on the images to enlarge them 5x5 times.

Knot3, take 0 Knot3, take 1

Knot3, take 2 Knot3, take 2

Wish list

I hope I could find a place in Internet where I could download wireframes models of real life objects. I would like to slice the Marilyn Monroe's wireframe model.

This page have been visited a lot of times since December 2nd, 2008

e-mail: