Hi,

I am currently starting to become use 3D programs, since I want to work on
graphics a little. I mainly wantto use the 3D programmes to generate high
quality graphics for my science/engineering projects.

So, I was wondering whether there are 3D graphics programmes where I can
input ascii data files and get a graphical representation. You understand
that I want to do more than the 3D graphics of Matlab and Mathematica. For
example, I have an ASCII file with the orbit of CASSINI spacecraft. What 3D
program can I use to generate a high quality graphical representation of
this orbit, according to the ASCII data file? Can POV RAY do this?

I know about Celestia and Satellite Tool Kit, but these are not so "graphics
programs" (well, celestia is a little, but still its not so user
friendly...).

Thank you very much,

Elias

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PovRay can read text files, you would have to interpret the data and convert
it to PovRay format.  And bascily PovRay is really good at graphics

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> So, I was wondering whether there are 3D graphics
programmes where I can
> input ascii data files and get a graphical representation.

Povray kind of specialises in it...


> For example, I have an ASCII file with the orbit of
CASSINI spacecraft
> What 3D program can I use to generate a high quality
graphical
> representation of this orbit, according to the ASCII data
file? Can
> POV RAY do this?

Depending on what you mean by this exactly, I'd say the
answer was yes in most cases.

If you have thousands of 2D or 3D co-ordinates representing
the position of Cassini at various times relative to Saturn
then you can simply use them in a sphere_sweep object.  This
will recreate your orbit plot in one single command.  If
this is the case then take care that you have enough data
points to render the inaccuracies introduced by the spline
functions negligible for your purposes.  Saturn can be
recreated fairly trivially by using a texture-mapped sphere
and a suitably textured disc object for the rings.  None of
this would stretch the beginner who has access to the
newusers newsgroup on this server.

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In article <40e564ab$1@news.povray.org>, "Josh" <som### [at] microsoftcom> 
wrote:

> PovRay can read text files, you would have to interpret the data and convert
> it to PovRay format. 

More importantly, the POV-Ray scene description language has file I/O 
commands, so if your data is formatted appropriately, you can write a 
scene that reads it directly.


> And bascily PovRay is really good at graphics

POV is very good at photorealistic graphics, and 3D surfaces, solids, 
and volumetrics. Line art is an example of something POV is not very 
good at. Especially 3D line art. Cylinder approximations of fine "lines" 
have a tendency to disappear or alias very badly, and the raytracing 
algorithm is simply very inefficient for drawing this sort of graphics.

Here's a crazy idea: a simple scripting language with support for 3D 
math and PostScript output may be of use for this kind of 
graphics...maybe it could even be squeezed into POV, so it could take 
advantage of things like depth buffers to clip obscured portions of the 
line drawing. Output would be a PostScript file which could be overlayed 
on top of the image with an external program, or perhaps POV could 
incorporate the necessary 2D drawing primitives (requiring a fair amount 
of extra work to implement).
This would be fairly useless for most artistic purposes (though it might 
have use for quick-rendering grass, hair, etc), but would be very useful 
for things like annotating visualizations of scientific data.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: <chr### [at] tagpovrayorg>
http://tag.povray.org/

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