Graphing & Plotting

This chapter shows some techniques to create graphic representations of the illuminance/irradiance values saved in the Radiance picture files created with rpict or the numeric results created by the rtrace program.

OpenDX is an open source project based on IBM’s Visualization Data Explorer. It is used to present serious amounts of data like GIS or meteorological data sets. Although it is a very complex software package it is highly flexible and features a unique graphic ‘pipeline editor’ to create and manipulate the representation of your data. It requires an X-Window server on Windows (like X-Win32) and Mac (application bundle on the OS X CD set).

VTK is a popular open source 3D computer graphics system for scientific data visualisation and image processing. As OpenDX it offers a lot of flexibility for the price of a learning curve. There are good examples and tutorials available on the net.

MayaVi is a graphical interface for vtk to help you with setting up and modifying a visualization. It is a bit tricky to install from source but binary packages are available for Windows and the major Linux distributions.