"Are you going on a long voyage?  I mean a REALLY long voyage, like traveling to another galaxy? And your ship cannot possibly hold enough supplies to keep 400  crewmenbers fed for 100 years?  You don't have a personnel problem, you have a storage problem.

"Do you have a remote colony that hasn't received its annual shipment of vital supplies, and you're worried you might have to kill off half the colonists to keep the other half alive?  You don't have a logistics problem, you have a storage problem.

"Do you just plain come from an overly large family and want some space and alone time for yourself?  Well, you DO have family problem, but you ALSO have a storage problem.

"We at the Andromeda Cuboctahedron company, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kelvan empire, have developed a technology that allows us to compact down any living thing into these attractive, but unfortuantely slightly fragile cuboctahedra, with a nearly unlimited shelf life. Let us solve your storage problems by helping your store your surplus population in a volume of less than 1,000 cubic centimeters at a fraction of the cost of keeping them supplied with necessities, until such time as they are needed again.  And if it turns out they are never needed again, the cuboctahedra readily crush into a fine bio-degradable powder."

"Act now, and your galaxy can join the Kelvan Empire for free as a protected client state that can, in a few thousand years, earn a full citizenship in the Empire."

Combination reference and texture photo, from the TrekCore media site:

I liked the displacement mapping better, as it gave a rougher appearance, but I couldn't figure out how to keep the surfaces from floating above the seams of the object.

And I had repeated incidents where somehow, the normals of some faces got reversed, a fact I usually discovered after saving the object and trying to bring it into Poser.  I quickly found that Hexagon has a feature/bug, where if you change the normal of a single face, all of the faces of the object lose their material definitions. (At least the actual material definitions survived, but all of the list storing the actual polygon/material assignments emptied itself.)

At least the over all UV mapping stayed intact, but even there, the UV map image saved to disk, while LOOKING like the UV map in the program,  had the actual mapped locations flipped vertically. In order for the texture map and the UV map to work together, I had to flip the texture map vertically.  And realizing that I was going to have an unknown period of further study to try and duplicate the achievements in Blender, which had already taken far too many DAYS, not hours, in Hexagon, I decided to temporarily stick to Hexagon to finish this ridiculously easy (in theory) project, instead of changing horses in midstream.

That said, I have only one more modeling project to accomplish in life, and I have to convince myself that it's worth teaching myself Blender, and how to accomplish the same things I learned to do with Hexagon in Blender's far superior environment, for just one last project.

I knew I was not particularly skilled in 3D modeling (which is why I will be using Joe Quick's supersuit developer kits for suits, gloves, and boots and then reshaping them), but this experienced with the cuboctahedron was downright humiliating. It makes me wonder if I've always been an idiot, or whether these things are a sign of slowly developing cognitive impairment.

Which is probably too much drama and TMI for everyone else here.  I'm an over-sharer; sorry about that.