How Maple exports 3d graphics to eps
16I have noticed that for 3d plots with a lot of info, when I export them to eps format and subsequently view them, say with adobe acrobat, the figure is filled in sort of from the back to the front. There are points in the rear of the figure (or what was the rear in the original) that are subsequently overwritten by points in the foreground. Thus, it seems that exported eps of 3d Maple plots have some sort of 3d info in them.
The reason I am asking is that I would love to convert the info in some of my eps exported 3d images (that sometimes took hours to compute), to a real 3d fomat like x3d. Is there enough 3d info in the exported image to convert it to x3d?
The export to x3d command works fine, but I don't want to spend hours recomputing some of these images in order to export them.
John Starrett
- perfect!
thanks
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3D
No, PostScript is inherently 2-dimensional. The "back-to-front" effect is simply the result of the order in which the elements are rendered, with the later ones overwriting the earlier ones.
2d postscript
So all the points from a 3d plot are saved, from back to front? That seems like an odd way to save 3d information to a 2d format. I suppose that it avoids having to compute a new image, ignoring the points that would be invisible, but it sure does waste space. Still, the eps files contain some 3d information, in that any point that will be overwritten as it is rendered is behind the new point... not enough info to do a complete 3d reconstruction though.
Thanks, Robert.
John Starrett
PostScript
Hmm... Well, I _thought_ this was the situation, but it seems that it's more complicated. It is still true that PostScript is a 2d format, and that the PostScript file contains no information about the third dimension. But it's not simply a matter of drawing the image back-to-front.
In Maple 13 Standard, it looks like for 3d plots the Standard worksheet renderer is actually used to produce a bitmap image which is saved to the PostScript file.
Maple has improved how it saves eps
I noticed that after the little upgrade recently, Maple now exports eps much more efficiently, with much smaller files. Kudos!
cliq on the figuer as with
cliq on the figuer as with right curseur you can see what you need and others options