New package for drawing direction fields with gnuplot

Hello,

El mi?, 17-11-2010 a las 13:12 -0800, Valery Pipin escribi?:
> on Wednesday 17 of November 2010 12:46:39 Valery wrote:
> > This is a wonderful extension!
> > Thank you very much, Mark!
> > Though, I'm personally not a fan of gnuplot.
> > 
> I meant fun :-), my accent penetrates in the writing :-)


Gnuplot is very good at 2d, but very bad at 3d.


> I wonder if the things that shown in the demo would be possible to extend
> for 3d field. For example,  these days i'm trying to visualize the fields 
> which is closed in  the spherical shell. I do it with mayavi,


Mayavi is a python interface to the Visualization Toolkit
(http://www.vtk.org)

Vtk is very good at 3d and very bad at 2d. It's the perfect companion
for Gnuplot.

Vtk is an open source graphics library written in C++ with python, java,
and tcl bindings.

I am not an expert in vtk, but I have played with the concept of writing
a Maxima interface where tcl makes the hard job for us. The idea is to
write a tcl script from Maxima and then call vtk to execute it.

The syntax is similar to that of package draw, and many graphic options
could be used in both packages.

Results are of better quality than those obtained from Gnuplot:

http://www.telefonica.net/web2/biomates/maxima/model3d


--
Mario