Decorating Spheres

Here are some openSCAD programs that can be used to decorate a sphere. The positions for the decorations are precalculated and held as a set of coordinates that lie on a unit sphere. Given such a set of coordinates a single rotate command followed by a single translate command positions a decoration on the surface of an arbitrary sphere. The decoration can be added or subtracted from the sphere. A cylinder and a cube were added to the decorations to make containers.

Five sets of the coordinates used here come from the Platonic solids. The Platonic solids have faces, edges, and vertices lying on spheres. Coordinates for the faces of the Platonic solids were calculated from the tables of translations in thing:30421, Rounded Platonic Dice. A sixth set comes from the atomic positions of the 60 atom Bucky Ball, a truncated icosahedron.


Six sample output files are included. They are:

tetrahedron_on_sphere.stl
cube_on_sphere.stl
octahedron_on_sphere.stl
dodecahed