Export figure to 3D interactive PDF

Summary

Export figure as a U3D file or directly to 3D interactive graphics within a PDF. Licensed under 2-clause BSD.

Documentation

PDF created for figure below (3d needs Adobe Reader).

The LaTeX needed looks like:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[dvipdfmx]{media9}

\begin{document}
    \begin{figure}
        \centering
        \includemedia[
            width=0.8\textwidth,
            activate=pagevisible,
            %deactivate=pageinvisible,
            3Dtoolbar,
            3Dviews=./example_supercyclide.vws
        ]{
            \includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{example_supercyclide.pdf}
        }{./example_supercyclide.u3d}
        \caption{An implicitly defined elliptic supercyclide.}
        \label{fig:example_supercyclide}
    \end{figure}
\end{document}

Description

fig2u3d saves the figure as a U3D file for inclusion as an interactive 3-dimensional figure within a PDF. Either LaTeX or Adobe Acrobat can be used to embed the U3D file in the PDF.

The idtf2u3d executables are included from this project (see dependencies below).

A vws file is also created, which contains the current camera view of the axes saved. This file can be used to set the figure's default view in the PDF to be the same with the open figure window in MATLAB.

The media9 LaTeX package can import U3D files with their associated VWS files in a PDF document.

For PDF readers which do not render 3D figures, it is possible to include an alternative 2D image as a substitute to the 3D object. For conveniency, the script saves a 2D image together with U3D file. File type and other options for exporting this 2D image can be specified as additional arguments.

fig2pdf3d Converts the figure directly to a PDF containing only an interactive 3D graphics object.

Graphics object supported for export include:

• line
• surface
• patch
• quivergroup
• contourgroup

Line colors and marker styles, surfaces and quivers with NaNs and surface shading are supported. Multiple instances of various objects can be plotted in the same axes and exported. Note that some limitations apply, for example filled contours are not yet supported.

Installation

Download & unpack from the release the:

• MATLAB code,
• idtf2u3d converter Mac OS X, Linux, Windows binaries, place this under idtf2u3d/bin (result: idtf2u3d/bin/glx… etc),
• required MATLAB packages, place them anywhere.

Add all the above and their subdirectories to your MATLAB path, e.g. using the pathtool command.

Optional

• fig2pdf3d needs a latex distribution (e.g. MikTeX, TeXLive, MacTeX) and media9 (preferred) or movie15 LaTeX package (replaced by media9).

Acknowledgments

• idtf2u3d converter binaries packaging taken from here

Dependencies included

• MATLAB mesh to PDF with 3d interactive object
• Generate vertices, faces and color for U3D format
• Generate U3D files from STL models for making multi-layer 3D PDF figures
• Arclength
• Vectorized MeshGrid
• Plot 2/3d Point(s)
• Plot 2/3d Vector(s)
• Take & restore hold
• Normalize n-dim vectors
• Cell Extrema
• Vector Norm
• Verbatim

Other

• Create 3d interactive html file from MATLAB figure
• MATLAB 3d figure to 3d xhtml
• Remnan
• Export Fig

License

This project is licensed under the 2-clause BSD license. The license file includes the authors of all dependencies, so that they can be distributed with this project.

Hosted

Development on github, releases here and also via File Exchange.

Keywords

3d, u3d, graphics, export, save, plot, surface, vector, quiver, quivergroup, mesh, contourgroup, contour, data export, mathematics, vision, latex, pdf, media9, movie15, pdflatex, xelatex