Rendering Issues in Pacioli’s Rhombicuboctahedron Carlo H. Séquin Raymond Shiau Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences University of California at Berkeley Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2015-169 http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-169.html June 24, 2015 Copyright © 2015, by the author(s). All rights reserved. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission. Acknowledgement This work is supported in parts by the Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP) at U.C. Berkeley. Rendering Issues in Pacioli’s Rhombicuboctahedron Carlo H. Séquin and Raymond Shiau EECS Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract The depiction of the glass rhombicuboctahedron (RCO) appearing in a famous painting of Pacioli (1495) is analyzed as to how much it might agree with a physically correct rendering of a corresponding glass container half-filled with water. This investigation shows that it is unlikely that the painter of the RCO was looking at such a physical object. The question is then raised what a proper rendering of such an object might look like. Detailed computer renderings are presented that take into account multiple internal and external reflections and refractions. A warning is issued to non-experts in the use of computer graphics tools, showing that one cannot simply plug in the geometry of the RCO into a readily accessible rendering program and expect to obtain photo-realistic results.