[gnwt4a]

Hello,


I am using tecplot which easy to use but does not produce good quality plots. matplotlib produces good quality graphs (in eps) but not 3d iso-surface (x,y,z,u) plots. are there any freeware that can produce publication quality 3d iso-surface plots?
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[aero_head]

Hello,

You could try Paraview, it's pretty decent and is similar to Tecplot.

[FMDenaro]

Originally Posted by gnwt4a

Hello,


I am using tecplot which easy to use but does not produce good quality plots. matplotlib produces good quality graphs (in eps) but not 3d iso-surface (x,y,z,u) plots. are there any freeware that can produce publication quality 3d iso-surface plots?
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What is the problem with Tecplot?

[Gerry Kan]

I have used matplotlib but I found the rendering a bit slow and resulting quality still leaves ample room for improvement, although it is very easy to write (python) scripts for automating plot generation.

If you are looking into getting high quality plots on a budget, you might want to look into R (or RStudio). It is an open source scripting "language" for statistical applications. It also comes with a very powerful visualization engine that lets you generate very beautiful, easy to interpret plots from high-dimensional data, in ways you'd never thought possible.

There are a number of caveats, though: Many of these plot default configs are catered to the stats or social science community. Changing them to an engineer specific setting can be a pain is the a$$. Also, the R scripting "language" itself is a huge inconsistent mess; what functions and arguments do are often very different from what their names suggest. For that reason, a lot of professional programmers will not hesitate to express their hatred towards R, myself included.

My personal experience with R is, while the end results are worth the trouble, it takes an disproportionately huge amount of effort to prepare them, especially if you are starting from scratch. It is much easier and faster to use Paraview and Tecplot to do a "good enough" job on visualization. The only place where R could be worth the effort is when you have to generate hundreds of high quality plots from your results, in which it is still more cost effective create R scripts for them.

Gerry.

[gnwt4a]

thanks to you all.