3-D Visualization

Lighting Overview

Lighting is a technique for adding realism to a graphical scene. It does this by simulating the highlights and dark areas that occur on objects under natural lighting (e.g., the directional light that comes from the sun). To create lighting effects, MATLAB defines a graphics object called a light. MATLAB applies lighting to surface and patch objects.

Lighting Examples

These examples illustrate the use of lighting in a visualization context.

• Tracing a stream line through a volume - sets properties of surfaces, patches, and lights. See "Example - "Creating a Fly-Through" in the "Defining the View Chapter".
• Using slice planes and cone plots - sets lighting characteristics of objects in a scene independently to achieve a desired result. See the coneplot function.
• Lighting multiple slice planes independently to visualize fluid flow. See the "Example - Slicing Fluid Flow Data" section in the "Volume Visualization Techniques" chapter.
• Combining single-color lit surfaces with interpolated coloring. See the "Example - Visualizing MRI Data" section in the "Volume Visualization Techniques" chapter.
• Employing lighting to reveal surface shape. The fluid flow isosurface example and the surface plot of the sinc function examples illustrate this technique. See the "Example - Isosurfaces in Fluid Flow Data" section in the "Volume Visualization Techniques" chapter and the "Visualizing Functions of Two Variables" section in the "Creating 3-D Graphs" chapter.

Lighting as a Visualization Tool

Lighting Commands