basic implementation for isosurface, isocolors, isonormals

[Ben Abbott]

On Mar 9, 2009, at 11:24 PM, Martin Helm wrote:

> Dear Octave maintainers,
>
> recently I made some preliminary implementation for isocolors,  
> isonormals,
> isosurface for my own use which I would like to share (isocaps will  
> follow in
> the near future). My first intention was to make a package at octave- 
> forge. As
> it turned out in the discussion at the OF mailing list that this  
> functions
> should go into octave itself  because these are base matlab  
> functions, I start
> this thread to continue the discussion which can be found at
>
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=200903051754.35446.martin%40mhelm.de&forum_name=octave-
> dev
>
> My functions can be found at
> http://www.mhelm.de/octave/pkg/visualize3d-0.1.5.tar.gz
> and some examples
> http://www.mhelm.de/octave/index.html
>
> I try to summarize the previous discussion:
>
> The iso* functions need a graphics backend which is able to  
> visualize filled
> 3d patches (at least triangle patches) if you want to visualize the  
> results in
> a matlab compatible way.
>
> This is at the moment possible with the fltk backend and also with the
> jhandles package but not with the gnuplot backend.
>
> As discussed in the mailig list mentioned above there might be a  
> chance to
> make filled 3d patches possible also with gnuplot for at least  
> triangle 3d
> patches (using pm3d), but it is not completely sure at the moment if  
> this will
> work or how fast it can be done.
>
> So I would be glad to receive some thoughts from you if you see this  
> functions
> as octave core functions (with the limitation in mind that they  
> cannot be used
> with gnuplot in the worst case) or as an addon which belongs to  
> octave-forge.
>
> I would also like to restart the discussion about the possibility to  
> introduce
> (a subset of) filled 3d patches with gnuplot backend here.
>
> Regards
> Martin Helm


Martin,

I'm interested in understanding what needs to be improved in the  
gnuplot backend to support this functionality.

Are 3D patches all that is needed? ... my ignorance might be showing,  
but is there any reason gnuplot's splot can't do the job?

Ben