The snub square tiling can be used as a circle packing, placing equal diameter circles at the center of every point. Every circle is in contact with 5 other circles in the packing (kissing number).[1]
An alternate truncation deletes every other vertex, creating a new triangular faces at the removed vertices, and reduces the original faces to half as many sides. In this case starting with a truncated square tiling with 2 octagons and 1 square per vertex, the octagon faces into squares, and the square faces degenerate into edges and 2 new triangles appear at the truncated vertices around the original square.
If the original tiling is made of regular faces the new triangles will be isosceles. Starting with octagons which alternate long and short edge lengths, derived from a regular dodecagon, will produce a snub tiling with perfect equilateral triangle faces.
Example:
Regular octagons alternately truncated
→
(Alternate truncation)
Isosceles triangles (Nonuniform tiling)
Nonregular octagons alternately truncated
→
(Alternate truncation)
Equilateral triangles
Related tilings
A snub operator applied twice to the square tiling, while it doesn't have regular faces, is made of square with irregular triangles and pentagons.
A related isogonal tiling that combines pairs of triangles into rhombi
A 2-isogonal tiling can be made by combining 2 squares and 3 triangles into heptagons.
This tiling is related to the elongated triangular tiling which also has 3 triangles and two squares on a vertex, but in a different order, 3.3.3.4.4. The two vertex figures can be mixed in many k-uniform tilings.[2][3]