For lovers of the geometric construct called "borromean rings".

I learnt of the drawing:

of the borromean rings within an
icosahedron

from the work of the sculptor John Robinson and drew it using Xfig (here is the src). This is a ruler and compass construction(!) that is described in some detail along with my submission for the IMSc logo. Then I hacked on some demo programs that came with the GLE library to produce the following C source file. This can be compiled (in the same way as other GLE demos) to produce an binary (i386-gnu-linux circa 2003) which can be rotated and examined. If you cannot run the program you can at least see this: snapshot.

It took a lot more effort to produce this single image stereogram of the rings. Blender was the 3-d modelling tool that I used to produce a grayscale depth map. I followed the tutorial on "DupliFrames" to create a ring which was then duplicated. Some extra tweaking of the light, texture and render parameters was required in order to eliminate the black borders that the default rendering produced around each ring; here is the "blend" file that contains all the necessary parameters. GIMP was the natural tool to produce the texture. The Xfig image above and a plasma render were composed along with some tweaks learnt from the GIMP tutorials. The final image was produced using Stereograph which can take a texture and a depth map and convert it into an stereogram.

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