George W. Hart              June 1995            File: ARTIFRAD.TXT

                   Artificial Radiolarian Reticulum

                      Description of ARTIFRAD.JPG

I have long been fascinated by radiolarians.  Radiolarians are 
microscopic ocean-living protozoa with complex geodesicly-perforated 
silica skeletons and sharp spicules.  Drawings of a great variety of 
Radiolaria skeletons by the 19th century naturalist Ernst Haeckel 
can be found in many books that deal with geometry, symmetry, and 
nature.  This image attempts to capture the idea of a photomicrograph
of a radiolarian and not any particular species.

The POVray source file ARTIFRAD.POV describes hand-tweaked cones and
cylinders which are assembled into a complex geodesic polyhedron.  The
positioning within the 3 "tendrils" on each spicule was generated using 
the lparser system, with the input file ARTIFRAD.LS.  The overall 
assemblage into a polyhedron is defined in the file GeoMaker.OUT which
was constructed by the program GeoMaker.  

GeoMaker is an easy-to-use program which constructs a wide variety of
polyhedral structure source files for POV.  It runs under Windows 3.1
and is written in Visual Basic.  I have not yet released it, but I plan 
to after I get around to documenting it more completely.  For more
examples of the varieties of figures it can generate, see the entry 
"Apples and Oranges" in the April 95 POVray competition and check out
all the images on this www page:

               http://www.li.net/~george/pavilion.html

(That page will also contain a link to the download the software
after I get around to releasing it.)

George Hart