Speeding up 3D rotation
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg122059] Speeding up 3D rotation
- From: Ralph Dratman <ralph.dratman at gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2011 04:24:07 -0400 (EDT)
- Delivered-to: l-mathgroup@mail-archive0.wolfram.com
I am working with a lot of 3D arrays for which Mathematica's real-time rotation is very useful. I have been rendering the arrays into 3D using colored cuboids. With careful setup of spacing between the cuboids, along with some transparency and the rotation feature, I can see inside the 3D structure reasonably well. In general am happy with these capabilities, but things are starting to get slow and worse, unreliable. The largest size array I have tried so far is 24x24x24. The initial rendering time for the image is tolerable, but at that size the rotation is too sluggish to be really useful. Sometimes Mathematica (or my computer) seems to get lost trying to do all that work, and I often have to force-quit the program, obviously not a good situation when one is concentrating on studying something complex. I would like to be able to work with up to about 100x100x100 voxels, but maybe that is not feasible yet. I am working on a Mac Mini now, but I also have a Dell running Windows XP that I could try, as well as an x86 Linux system. I can spend a few hundred dollars to put a new graphics card into one of the computers, if that would help, but a multi-thousand-dollar graphics investment is not in my future. Any advice or links would be much appreciated. Thank you. Ralph Dratman