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Picture if you will, a record player turntable on top of which are hills and valleys sculpted from clay. The viewer would want to rotate table and also incline or decline his view. What the turntable surface would represent are X and Y locations of a sheet laser shown through falling mist, this while the hill and valley heights represent the light extinction values resulting from spray cone mist falling perpendicularly through that plane.
I can use Perl to extract said values for X, Y and Z from the output file of an instrument called an En Urga SetSCAN 600. My question, therefore, is whether I can create such a view with Processing 3.
My alternate thought was to translate the XYZ data into the 3D CAD format STEP. I'm sure that would work, but might not be pretty. A friend recommended looking into either D3.js or Processing 3.
Answers
Have you had a look at the 3D tutorial? I imagine what you're after is possible though I've not done any 3D work myself. You can certainly change view positions and light levels.
https://www.processing.org/tutorials/p3d/ https://processing.org/examples/perspective.html
Processing 3 is but one of plural suggestions offered on other forums. I'm rather hoping for someone who actually knows to say "yes" or else to say "no". That would save me the need of reviewing a plethora of different tutorials on various forums.
Lazy of me to a degree, but I work enough overtime as it is, all on salary and so not paid. I'll put off reviewing those for after when someone who knows answers with "yes" rather than "no". Nevertheless, thank you for pointing those out.
the devil hides in details
the answer is yes, but since processing is general purpose,e.g. the speed could go down or some other details could appear
test yourself:
Thank you for this. I will buy some books and have a go. Nothing is ever so helpful as an actual example.
;-)
I now have three books. At first glance there seems little in them to do with Z axis as 3rd physical dimension. But Chrisir's example is quite proof enough. Baby steps for me, then, I guess.
see tutorial
https://www.processing.org/tutorials/p3d/
see here:
http://openprocessing.org/collection/4687
http://openprocessing.org/collection/1190
see
chapter M3 here:
http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/code