3d surface graph: Plotting Multiple Surfaces (ActiveX Surface Graph vs. Non-ActiveX Surface Graph)

[DonRoth]

Posting this as an FYI.  It appears that the plotting of multiple surfaces is done differently depending which 3d surface graph type that you select to work with.   Took the same 10 slices and did the experiment.  The ActiveX surface graph stacks the surfaces while the non-ActiveX surface graph seems to overlay them.

[hanrock]

But I got overlay surfaces on ActiveX graph using the same copy of input. How to plot the stack ones?

Here is my code:

[altenbach]

Do us a favor and post the vi instead of pictures. Why should we waste time recreating it from sratch.

[hanrock]

Attach my VI. Version 2010.

[DonRoth]

Folks - Here is some further background regarding rendering / stacking multiple images using the ActiveX 3d surface graph.

I might add that it is not necessarily a one-to-one comparision in how these graphs are implemented in LabVIEW.  But thought it would be useful to at least show this.

Don

[altenbach]

OK, so the attached VI does not what you want for both types of graphs.

If you want to plot flat planes with a certain image texture, you need to use the 3D surface graph (the one with the all red icon). Create data that has all Z values the same for each slice and wire the actual Z data to the "color matrix" input on top of the icon. 

[Wonger]

The colormap corruption that Christian mentioned occurs when the range between the min and max Z values is 0, i.e. when Z min = Z max for a particular plot. If you can instead make the range some very small number, this should work around the issue. This should no longer be an issue in 2012.

[altenbach]

Try something like this....

 

[DonRoth]

I think this approach can probably work and optimal separation determined based on the data set.  For my test, just adding in the "i" value to the image array was not sufficient.  I tried adding 20 x i, which starts to show some plane separation.  Note that the display is still not showing the same as for the ActiveX 3d surface graph per my initial post.

Sincerely,

Don

[Wonger]

I just realized that Christian did not mention that colormap corruption problem in his post here. That is one issue that you could run into when trying to do something like this, since your layers have 0 thickness. The example that Christian posted should work around this by giving each plot a small non-zero thickness.