Month: May 2013

Semi-Sculptures

Proton (2 up quarks and a down quark) : Wire
4-D Cube Projected into 3-D Space : straws, wax, and paper
Rubik’s Cube Solving Lego Mindstorms Robot : Mindstorms 2.0

Matlab: Smooth Rotating Animation for Line Plots

I recently became stuck trying to create an animation which consists of a smooth rotation of a viewpoint around the Lorenz attractor. Methods I use for changing viewpoints with respect to surface objects were creating jerky, lagging animations when applied to my line plot.

This will work for any 3D line plot:

plot3(x,y,z);
axis vis3d
fps = 60; sec = 10;
vidObj = VideoWriter('plotrotation.avi');
vidObj.Quality = 100;
vidObj.FrameRate = fps;
open(vidObj);
for i=1:fps*sec
    camorbit(0.9,-0.1);
    writeVideo(vidObj,getframe(gcf));
end
close(vidObj);

This results in the following smooth animation: