Hi all, I'll mention again that I intend to continue supporting mplot3d, although help would be greatly appreciated.
I think the z-ordering issues are in the end quite hard to tackle, especially since we can have different kinds of structures in a plot, e.g. polygons and lines (or rather: curves). John's suggestion of a global polygon list would indeed be a good way forward, and I will think about implementing this soon. However, the next step of finding intersecting polygons and breaking them properly could be quite slow if implemented in pure python. So I'm not sure whether our goal should be to create a full 3d engine... Cheers, Reinier On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 5:15 PM, John Hunter <jdh2...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Ben Axelrod <baxel...@coroware.com> wrote: >> John, your assesment of the problem is correct. And I believe your >> suggested solution is also correct. Currently, each call to a mplot3d plot >> method is treated independantly. They get converted into custom >> PolyCollections which each do the Z-order sorting. > >> >> There is still an issue here however. Even if we implement the >> aformentioned solution, we are still only approximating a 3d library. And >> the result will still not be as nice as matlab. I believe that because we >> treat the surface as a series of 2D polygons, the intersection between two >> surfaces will be at the polygon edges. See the attached image for an >> example of what the intersection between a sphere and plane might look like. > > True enough, but as your example shows it would still be a substantial > improvement over what we have now, and by getting all the faces in the > scene into a single data structure, we leave open the possibility of > doing something more sophisticated down the road (like chopping a > problematic face into multiple faces, some in front, some behind, an > intersecting object). > > JDH -- Reinier Heeres Tel: +31 6 10852639 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
