There are almost 10M of animated images loading. If you click on the stop button of your browser after a little while, you should see the table load with (broken) images. Click on the image, or text, to go straight to the full size animated image.
The two images of each of the Platonic solids are different rotations, for instance, the axis through the vertex and through a face or edge.
The images were created by mapping a cylindrical projection of the planetry topography onto the solid in the POVRay raytraycing program. A set of 36 images each representing 10 degrees of rotation was then fed to the GIF animator program.
The earth topography (image) was created by Dr Jon Kimmerling, and the topography for the other planets was collected off the web at NASA and other sites.
| tetrahedron |
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| cube |
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| octohedron |
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| dodecahedron |
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| icosahedron |
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| sphere |
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icosahedron to sphere | |
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| flyby | Venus | Mars | Jupiter | Pluto |