3D animation

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Feb-2009, Bart Vandewoestyne wrote:

| Hello,
| 
| I have a function F(x,y,t) of space (x,y) and time (t) and I
| would like to create an animation of it that I can run in Octave.
| 
| I tried something like the following:
| 
| clf;
| 
| nb_tics = 100;
| [x, y] = meshgrid(linspace(0,300,nb_tics), linspace(0,500,nb_tics));
| 
| surf(x, y, F(x,y,0));
| hold on
| drawnow
| 
| t = [0.1:0.1:5];
| for i = 1:length(t)
|   surf( x, y, F(x,y,t(i)) );
|   drawnow
| end
| 
| 
| But with this code, the updating of the figure window is not done fast enough
| and the animation is absolutely not fluent, even on my recent HP laptop.
| 
| Could somebody tell me what method to use in order to make the animation
| more fluent?  Pointers to relevant information on the Internet are also
| welcome, as my Google search didn't come up with any useful pages yet...

What is F in the above?

In any case, this is most likely a limitation of the speed of 3D
rendering in gnuplot, but I'd be interested to see exactly what you
are seeing, so it would be helpful if you could post a complete
working example.

jwe