Exporting 3d plots as u3d files

[vickyscowcroft]

Is there any way of exporting a 3d plot, such as a 3d scatter plot, to a u3d file for use in a PDF? It would be really useful for including interactive 3d plots in journal articles which tend to still be distributed as PDFs.
Thanks

[pelson]

Hi @vickyscowcroft, I think this is a really interesting idea, but one for the matplotlib mailinglist rather than the issue tracker itself. I suspect, though don't know for 100% certain, that this kind of usecase has not been addressed with the 3d plotting functionality of matplotlib - hopefully the mailinglist will be able to help if I'm wrong.

I hope you don't mind but I'm going to go ahead and close the issue - but I for one will look interestingly at what I hope will be a fruitful discussion.

Cheers!

[WeatherGod]

Sorry for the delay in responding.

Unfortunately, with the current architecture of matplotlib, all the 3D data
gets projected into 2D prior to the rendering stage. This is because
matplotlib's drawing core is a 2D layering engine. Therefore, it would
require a complete re-write of matplotlib's core to properly support 3D
graphics. mplot3d is merely a kludge to work around this problem.

One day, I hope to see this re-write occur using OpenGL, but there are
still some limitations that keep us from making that switch (text rendering
in OpenGL is lousy).

In the meantime, I suggest taking a peek at the GlumPy project. It is an
experimental mashup of matplotlib and OpenGL, so it should be very familiar
to matplotlib users. Perhaps that project is much more suited to supporting
these filetypes.

Cheers!

[vickyscowcroft]

Thank you both for your quick replies and for the explanations.

I'll take a look at GlumPy and see what it can do.

Thanks!