Who would have thought it?
Seriously. This is getting a little silly now. All I want is a (reasonably) simple program which allows me to plot a great big 3D data set, export it as a good quality PS file and allow me to import it into my project.
But ooooh no. That would be waaay too much to ask. I’ve tried pretty much every program out there, from OpenDX to freaking gnuplot, and nothing is working. Absolutely nothing. It hasn’t helped that I’ve had to recompile vtk a number of times now, and on top of that I’ve been sat around for the past god knows how many hours waiting for numerous other packages to compile.
Now, I know I shouldn’t complain about Gentoo, because it’s not its fault. I just wish that things didn’t contain a gizillion lines of source code so that they’d install sometime this bloody year.
On the upside, vtk just finished compiling for the third time, so lets see if it works now, eh?
PS: It didn’t work. I now have to wait another 40 minutes for it to compile again. I hate my life.
24/10/2006 10:56 pm
If you find any 3d graphing software, can’t you export as PNG and use convert to make an EPS?
25/2/2006 2:59 am
Well, that’s a good way of doing it. However, my problem was actually finding a piece of 3D graphics software that would deal with the 50MB+ of data being generated by my program. In the end, I found another program which was unrelated all of the stuff I mentioned here, called GMT. It’s officially a map-creating program used for stuff like topological maps, but it suits my purposes greatly.
If you want to have a look at one of the plots I outputted, have a look here. It’s looking quite nice now.
The process, for those that are interested, is to output as (x, y, z) co-ordinates, then use the xyz2grd program to convert this to a GRD format file. It’s then a simple matter of creating a colour map and intensity file, then running grdview to produce the final output. It comes out as something like a 20mb PostScript file in the end, but I decided to convert this (using ImageMagick) to a PNG which is the one you see before you. PDF output of my LaTeX file looks superb, so no complaints from me.