Three dimensional graphics, illustrations and animations

• Published 2005-11-08 (2 years, 6 months ago)
• Updated 2007-03-28 (1 year, 1 month ago)

Over the last couple of months I've been experimenting with how to create three dimensional graphics, illustrations and animations. My investigations have had two different goals:

• Artistic, eye catching visualizations and animations for use in presentations and promotions.
• Simple but accurate and professionally looking illustrations for use in scientific and technical publications.

During the process I have discovered two gems:

Blender

An open source program for 3D modeling, animation and rendering

Sketch

A small, simple system for producing line drawings of two- or three-dimensional solid objects and scenes. Sketch generates PSTricks code for LaTeX.

Blender have existed for a few years now, but Sketch is a relatively new and unknown tool in the (La)TeX community. A brief introduction is therefore necessary.

Update: For more information about Sketch, read my recent notebook entry:An introduction to Sketch 3D for PGF and TikZ users

A few words about Sketch

Creating high-quality three-dimensional illustrations for technical and scientific publications is a nontrivial task. Take the illustration below as an example. You may recognize it as an illustration of the Denavit-Hartenberg parameters used in robotics.

The drawing looks quite simple, but it has all the qualities I'm looking for:

• The annotations have mathematical symbols and Greek letters typeset with (La)TeX.
• The drawing is in vector format (click on it to download a PDF version).
• Angles, distances and projections are accurate and mathematically correct.

Update: The source code for the figure is now available.

My first attempt to create the drawing was with PSTricks. PSTricks is an impressive collection of macros for creating high-quality drawings and illustrations with TeX/LaTeX. Just take a look at these examples to see some of the possibilities. PSTricks excels at 2D graphics, but it is also possible to draw simple 3D graphics with additional packages such as pst-3dplot and pst-3d.

When drawing 3D scenes it's necessary to have access to mathematical tools like rotation matrices, transformations etc. PSTricks is based on TeX and Postscript. Doing 3D math in TeX is possible, but it is quite cumbersome and difficult unless you are a TeX guru. Fortunately there exists a tool that makes out lives easier; Sketch.

Sketch is a small, simple system for producing line drawings of two- or three-dimensional solid objects and scenes. According to the authors, Sketch is designed for creating finely wrought, mathematically-based illustrations with no extraneous detail. Sketch accepts a tiny scene description language and generates PSTricks code for LaTeX. Sketch also supports hidden surface removal and its easy to embed PSTricks and LaTeX code in your drawings.

When I first tried to create my Denavit-Hartenberg illustration with PSTricks and pst-3dplot, I soon gave up because I realized that I had to do most of the 3D math myself. With Sketch I had access to all the mathematical and geometrical tools I needed, making it much easier and faster to create the drawing. I can also easily change the viewpoint:

Sketch is well worth investing some time in! It's a nice addition to your graphics toolbox, especially if you like PSTricks.