Somebody told me they liked my Buckyball and wondered how I made it. Well, here's a short explanation.

A Buckyball, or Buckminsterfullerene, is really a carbon-60 molecule. The 60 atoms are arranged like the vertices of a truncated icosahedron. An icosahedron is a regular polyhedron with 20 faces. It has 12 vertices, so to truncate it we need a regular polyhedron with 12 faces, like a dodecahedron. Happily, Lightwave comes with a Platonic Solids macro that lets us create both the icosahedron and the dodecahedron.

• Pop up the Platonic Solids macro and ask it for an icosahedron
• Go to another layer
• Pop up the Platonic Solids macro and ask it for a dodecahedron
• Put the icosahedron on the background layer.
• Fiddle with the dodecahedron until its flat bits line up with the pointy bits on the icosahedron
• Do a Boolean Intersect

Now you're left with a spunky truncated icosahedron. All that's left to do is to hit Remove Polygons and Particle Clone some spheres over the remaining points. Voila! Instant Buckyball.

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