A Blender 4.2+ / 5.x extension bundling 150+ generators for mathematical sculpture. Each one adds a ready‑to‑render mesh or curve straight to the viewport — centered on the origin, fit to a 2 m cube, and driven by a live redo panel so every parameter is explorable. The mathematics is implemented faithfully (and self‑tested), and every generator credits the mathematicians and papers behind it.
Everything lives under Add ▸ Mesh ▸ Math Art, organized into families:
| Family | Count | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Surfaces | 30 | The deepest collection here — classical and triply‑periodic minimal surfaces (Costa, gyroid, the Schwarz and Schoen families, Scherk towers), an encyclopedia of algebraic, quadric, ruled, swept and revolution surfaces (backed by a 470‑record surface database), plus canal, focal and Calabi‑Yau cross‑sections |
| Polyhedra | 29 | Platonic → Archimedean → Catalan solids, Johnson solids, uniform and canonical forms, stellations, compounds, zonohedra, and 4‑dimensional polytopes projected to 3‑space |
| Patterns | 22 | Wallpaper and frieze groups, Islamic strapwork, isohedral and k‑uniform tilings, Penrose and aperiodic (hat/spectre) tilings, and soft cells — many now mappable onto curved surfaces |
| Knots & Curves | 16 | Torus and tight knots, links and connected sums, Seifert surfaces, space‑filling and parametric curves |
| Fractals | 13 | L‑systems, diffusion‑limited aggregation, iterated function systems, and fractal polyhedra |
| Weaves & Tangles | 10 | Woven polyhedra and shells, Celtic interlace, polylinks and tangled compounds |
| Odds & Ends | 9 | Supershapes, spherical harmonics, and other one‑offs |
| Plants & Growth | 8 | Phyllotaxis, leaf venation, and growth‑driven forms |
| Rollers | 7 | Sphericons, oloids, and other constant‑width and rolling solids |
| Styles | 5 | Post‑process any mesh — ball‑and‑stick, face coloring, fabrication slicing, relief screens |
| Origami | 2 | Classical crease patterns with a real folding solver, and a crease‑pattern importer |
- Minimal‑surface toolkit — 150+ minimal surfaces, from the textbook catenoid and Enneper to the full triply‑periodic zoo (gyroid, Schwarz P/D, the Schoen family), each built from its exact Weierstrass data rather than contoured.
- Calabi‑Yau cross‑section — Hanson's parametrisation of the quintic slice, the surface behind nearly every "Calabi‑Yau" picture, with its torus‑knot boundary.
- Symmetric Sculpture — a Blender adaptation of George W. Hart's sculpture‑design program (behind pieces like Frabjous and Whimsy): draw one flat motif and it replicates live into a whole symmetric family of planes.
- Origami — nine classical crease patterns (Miura, waterbomb, Kresling, Ron Resch…) folded by a rigid‑panel or bending‑paper solver, with the whole fold path cached as shape keys so it animates.
- Scherk–Collins sculptures — the toroidal warped‑saddle towers of Brent Collins and Carlo Séquin.
- Polyhedra, end to end — every Platonic, Archimedean and Catalan solid, all 92 Johnson solids, the 59 stellations of the icosahedron, and regular compounds, on one consistent footing.
- Knots & Seifert surfaces — torus and tight knots with the spanning surfaces of their links.
- Curved‑surface tilings — wallpaper, Islamic and isohedral patterns wrapped conformally onto spheres and tori.
Explore the mathematics in your browser at dwkrider.github.io/Math-Art — an interactive companion that computes polyhedra and surfaces live from exact geometry (nothing pre‑rendered), backed by the project's 470‑record surface database. You can spin each object, read its defining formulae, and export a printable STL straight from the surface viewer. (More families will follow.)
Browse the generator gallery → — a render of every shape, each linking to a page with a usage walkthrough, the underlying mathematics, its configuration options, and full references.
- Download the latest
math_art-*.zipfrom the Releases page (or build it, below). - In Blender: Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Get Extensions, open the ⌄ menu (top‑right) ▸ Install from Disk…, and choose the zip — or simply drag the zip into the Blender window.
- Everything appears under Add ▸ Mesh ▸ Math Art, plus the Minimal Surfaces / Scherk / Woven N‑panel tabs for the live tools.
If you previously installed the individual files as legacy add‑ons, remove those first.
blender --command extension build --source-dir math_art \
--output-filepath dist/math_art-<version>.zipEach module in math_art/ also works on its own as a classic
single‑file add‑on via Install from Disk.
Every documentation image is produced by one consistent studio script (black‑velvet backdrop, soft studio lighting, white‑plastic material on uncolored shapes while generator colors are preserved). The figure set is the Add menu itself, so nothing needs listing by hand:
blender --background --factory-startup --python docs/render_docs.pyIt renders only what is missing; pass -- --all to re-render, slugs to
pick a subset (-- tangle polytope4d), or -- variants for the
per‑option galleries. -- --list shows coverage without rendering.
The rest of the pipeline:
blender --background --factory-startup --python docs/scaffold_pages.py
python docs/insert_variants.py # galleries into the pages
python docs/build_index.py # regenerate docs/README.md
python tests/test_docs.py # coverage gateGPL‑3.0‑or‑later. Each generator page lists the mathematical sources and attributions its implementation draws on.