News, Views & Insights
Twisted Pictures
I have a lot to study at the moment, as I learn how to use the technology that’s in our development pipeline. One of the first features I played with was so much fun I thought I would share it with you. You will be able to efficiently and easily texture map over any 3D image.
Texture mapping has all kinds of practical uses for improving visualization, but the first thing that I thought of was setting fire to a plot…
And then I thought of what the world might look like if it were toroidal…
And then what would happen if this blog post were suddenly sucked into the screen…
I’ll come back to it another day with some serious uses!
(Images courtesy of Wikipedia. First image, photo by Fir0002.)
This seems a lot more practical than using ListPlot3D with VertexColors for each point! like:
pic=Reverse[ExampleData[{“TestImage”,”Lena”},”Data”]/255.];
ListPlot3D[Table[x+ Sin[x y],{x,-5,5,.1},{y,-5,5,.1}],Mesh->None,VertexColors->{pic[[5;;-5;;5,5;;-5;;5]]},Lighting->”Neutral”]
So when are we going to see this? A small upgrade to 7.1 or version 8.0?
The last graphic is really very clever!
Pretty, Jon! I hope that soon enough, the computers will be fast enough to do similar things with videos, too.
Such calculations may be fast in Mathematica as long as they’re directly incorporated into Mathematica commands – and the user only needs to perform a relatively small number of Mathematica commands.
It may be a good idea to give Mathematica a kind of compiler – so that the command Sander wrote above could do similar pictures as quickly as the “new texture option” presented by Jon.
Jon McLoone
Can you rotate the textures or place texture on particular locations and orientations?
Can you map the textures with different projection types?
How about bump maps and displacement maps? Those will also be a really nice addition! Are those things also in the new release?
The last graphic is really very clever!
Great, I love this! Will this feature arrive in v8 or is it planned for a later version?
oh, how cruel to see all of this and not being able to use it yet… :)