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 "Defining the View" in the Using MATLAB Graphics documentation.
• 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 "Example -- Slicing Fluid Flow Data" in Volume Visualization Techniques in the Using MATLAB Graphics documentation.
• Combining single-color lit surfaces with interpolated coloring. See "Example -- Visualizing MRI Data" in Volume Visualization Techniques in the Using MATLAB Graphics documentation.
• Employing lighting to reveal surface shape. The fluid flow isosurface example and the surface plot of the sinc function examples illustrate this technique. See "Example -- Isosurfaces in Fluid Flow Data" in Volume Visualization Techniques and "Visualizing Functions of Two Variables" in Creating 3-D Graphs in the Using MATLAB Graphics documentation.

Lighting as a Visualization Tool

Lighting Commands

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