[Plplot-devel] 3D solids

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

If you look at
http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/News/Code-Statistics-KDE-Costs-175-Million-Dollars
you will find a pie chart represented as a 3D solid surface that looks
pretty good, and it would be nice to have such a plot implemented as the
second page of example 13.

Note drawing 3D solids is not trivial because there is an issue concerning
hidden surfaces (or at least surfaces that are semi-hidden by the
semi-transparent overlying layers) to deal with.  I believe that could be
taken care of in general by storing all surfaces representing the 3D solid,
sorting them by their (minimum or maximum) distance in the line of sight,
and painting them in that order.  I bring up the semi-transparent case since
I think that would look pretty cool for a 3D pie chart (and most other 3D
solids we wanted to draw).

Note, I don't plan to implement plots of 3D solids myself since I have no
personal need for 3D pie charts (or 3D solids of any kind), but I thought I
would bring up this possibility in case someone feels inspired by their own
needs or by the interesting challenge of dealing with the hidden surfaces to
do an implementation.

Alan
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Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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