MATLAB and vizard

[xingtzu]

Hey folks,

I've been tasked to figure out how to get some of the features of MATLAB working with Vizard. Namely my boss wants me to figure out how to do cone plots, streamtube plots, streamribbon plots, streamline plots, and isosurface plots. If you have a copy of MATLAB you can see the demo he wants me to reproduce by executing the command "demos" then under MATLAB, 3d Visualization click Volume Visualization.

To my question. I'm trying to figure out what the best way to take in these images. MATLAB can export to VRML using it's VR toolbox and I can create an executable with the command I want and pass it arguments using the command line but how would I run that from a Python script. Is there a better way? Can python directly interface with MATLAB using some of it's 3D graphing tools. And most importantly, once I get the 3D model, is it in a format which I can use in Vizard or will it need to be converted/recreated from data points.

Ideally I'm trying to use MATLAB as the back end for speed and familiarity. We are an electrical engineering college and MATLAB is a standard for students entering this project where python is not. If we can make a way for students to use functions from MATLAB or generate python commands from MATLAB scripts than that would be ideal for some of of projects.

Sorry for the long post just wanted to explain the whole situation. Any ideas or comments are appreciated. I was handed a project bigger than I'm certain what to do with, and I'm just hoping for some direction from someone who might have been there/is smarter than me.

Thanks

Xing

[farshizzo]

There is a Python module that interfaces to MATLAB called PyMat. However the project has not been updated for a while, so it might now work with Python 2.4.

There is also a Python module for scientific computing called NumPy.

Vizard supports VRML 2.0 models, so if MATLAB can export to that format then you should be able to view it in Vizard. Vizard supports many other formats as well, see the website or documentation for a list.