Re: Handle graphics plotting functions

[Sebastien Loisel]

Speaking of just being able to implement 2d.  I was thinking of making a
3d to 2d flattener (is there a better word for it).  To do this, I was
wondering if anyone has a suggestion on how to efficiently determine if an

It's called visible surface determination and I'm an expert at this and my recommendation is that if you're hoping to do this for the MATLAB plots, don't spend too much time on it. Doing it approximately requires a sort along the Z axis (painter's algorithm) but doing it better requires more sophisticated algorithms. The Z buffer algorithm and the scanline algorithm are good for producing pixel data, but not for producing 2d vector data. For producing 2d vector data, you need something like BSP trees.

None of this is hard to implement in isolation, but it'll take you a while to integrate all you need to it, so I'm just saying, you should probably not mess with it. Even though I am an expert at this, and even though this is basically required to render 3d plots onto the 2d screen or to EPS, I am going to avoid implementing any of that crap by using Christophe Geuzaine's gl2ps (which implements a couple of algorithms including BSP, but even he used a third party library for that.)

Cheers,

Sébastien Loisel