Using lighting, shininess with Gizmo scatter plot

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Tue, 12/21/2010 - 02:43 pm

I'd like to use lighting effects with a Gizmo scatter plot. I watched the tutorial video for how to do this with a surface or a quadratic shape, but it does not seem like the same thing will work for the scatter plot. After creating a lighting attribute and adding it to the object and display lists, I figured I needed to specify normals for the scatter points (spheres). Specifically, I figured I could just add a quadratic normals attribute, set it to, say, GLU_SMOOTH, and then just drag it to the scatter plot object. This didn't seem to work.

Am I trying to do something impossible? It seems like the example in the Scatter Plots section of Visualization.ihf has lighting and shininess (another attribute I'd like to apply but haven't succeeded at, probably because I can't get the lighting to work).

I'm attaching an image of the graph I'm working on. I just want to give the 3D scatter points some sense of dimension. Without some kind of lighting effects, the don't really have the appearance of "floating" in the space.

Any help out there?

Thanks,
Nick
Hello Nick,

I suspect you are using the built-in sphere object. If that is the case, create your own sphere object in Gizmo. Drag onto it the Quadric normals attributes and then edit the scatter object to replace the built-in sphere with your sphere. That will also give you the opportunity to use a higher resolution (rounder) sphere.

If this does not help, feel free to send me a copy of your experiment and I'll help you with that.


A.G.
WaveMetrics, Inc.

December 21, 2010 at 03:17 pm - Permalink

Hi A.G.,

Thanks for offering to take a look at my Gizmo issues. Here's a pxp with the graph...

I tried your suggestions, but I am still not getting it to work. Turning on the lighting actually makes the plot darker, and then changing the light orientation/color seems to have no effect. In addition to what you suggested (replacing the scatter points with my own sphere object which carries the quadratic normals), I added a color attribute to the sphere object and then set the scatter plot color to "none". I've also messed around with shininess, again to no avail.

I think I'm just Gizmo inept ;) .

Thanks,
Nick
gizmo plot.pxp

December 21, 2010 at 06:27 pm - Permalink