ball_and_stick_display, an Octave code which makes a 3D ball and stick plot.
MATLAB has many procedures for displaying numeric data in 3D using contours, vector plots, surfaces and so on. However, sometimes an illustrator needs to construct a simple 3D image of points and lines. Since the thing has to show up as an illustration or a slide, the points are exaggerated to balls, and the lines to sticks.
MATLAB's plot3 command can create both kinds of objects, but it helps to know how to specify the desired object properties for color and size. The MATLAB help system is not very helpful when trying to find out what properties you can specify and what values they can have.
So this program may be a helpful example of how a 3D object can be created with knobby balls and colored sticks.
The particular object created here is intended to illustrate the Lax-Wendroff scheme for approximating the solution of a hyperbolic partial differential equation. The blue spheres represent points at which data is known. The green spheres represent points at which fluxes are estimated by computing differences between neighboring values. The red sphere is the locationi of the updated solution value.
The information on this web page is distributed under the MIT license.
ball_and_stick_display is available in a MATLAB version and an Octave version.
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