Polytope Models.

A variety of models are availabe to view: regular polyhedra, regular polychora, truncted polytopes, edge-truncated polytopes, snub(?) polytopes, tori (duoprisms), Cayley grahs (omnitruncated polytopes), etc. My favorite is the bitruncated 120-cell.



Viewing Options.

The scroll wheel (or arrow keys) zoom in and out, and SHIFT+ARROW pans for those hard-to-reach shots. Full-screen is buggy and can be turned on but not off.

Motion.

The models float around (rotating with six degrees of freedom) with nearly constant velocity. The motion can be controlled with all three mouse buttons (each fixing a pair of axes of the 3-sphere); spacebar toggles the brakes, which are on by default. To get some funky motion, or just keep a model in one place, you can enable a spring tying the model to a "center" positon. If the model moves too fast or too slowly, try slowing down or speeding up.

Flying.

In flying mode, the right mouse button controlls speed and the left mouse button steers direction. It helps to zoom in, and maybe turn off faces (f) and fatten the edges (+).

Style Options.

Both solid and line-art rendering are available (see style menu or press 'h'). Vertex and edge-drawing can be toggled. Drawing thickness can be adjusted, and fog can be added to aid depth perception.

Camera.

Models can be viewed in either mono or stereo. Jenn now allows motion and depth-of-field blurring. Screen-shots can be taken with extended exposure time and increased rendering quality. The accumulation buffer also provides high-contrast viewing and color-reversing

Saving. (when compiled with libpng support)

Images can be saved to color or grayscale png images (jenn_capture.png). Jenn3d can make very large images (&ge 1 GigaPixel) by tiling the images. But Beware! large high-quality images take alot of time and disk space, e.g. 1 day and 100Megs. For high quality images like that above, and those on wikipedia, I usually take a picure double-sized and downsample by a factor of two.

Exporting.

You can save 3D mesh models to .STL files with the 'export' button. Note that toggling between high/low quality in Jenn3D changes the output mesh density (try viewing in wireframe style to see this). For 3d-printing (stereolithography) you might want to increase the minimum tube radius (after version 2008:03:13). The added radius is not shown in Jenn3D (still on the to-implement queue), so you'll have to view with your favorite STL file viewer to get it right. Some users have reported good results with Magics and 3dconverter. Let me know about how exporting works for you.

Bugs.

Libpng does not seem to work (even compile) under Cygwin. Jenn can usually switch to fullscreen mode ('f') but not back. This is really a bug in the Glut library, and apparently has no fix. :( Scroll wheel does not seem to work in MacOS or Windows. This is apparently a flaw in the Glut library.

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