Image to Surface Dialog Box


Surface Plotter displays this dialog box after completely loaded an image (from a local disk or from network). The above image is a screen shot of this dialog box on Windows 95 (tm) platform. There are four buttons (+1, +10, -10, -1) that allow you change the number of divisions to be made on surface during conversion. Surface Plotter displays vertical and horizontal lines in red and will convert only pixels on the intersections of the lines. The more the number of divisions is, the smoother the surface will be, but the overall process becomes slower.

There is also a special button invert useful to invert the colors of image being displayed.

The conversion follows these rules:

  • The axes origin is set to the center of the image.
  • X axis is placed horizontally, with positive x points to the right side of the image.
  • Y axis is placed vertically, with positive y points to the top side of the image.
  • If the width and the height of the image are different, Surface Plotter chooses the shorter one and converts it to a range -1..+1. The other one will be converted to a proportional range. If your image's height is twice of its width, the x range will become -1..+1 and the y range will become -2..+2.
  • The Z level is always in the range 0..+1. You can change this range after the conversion using the Edit|Stretch Z Levels menu. (See: Stretch Z dialog box)

Credits:

Thanks to Mark Westenberger from Ottawa, Canada for the idea of Image to Surface conversion feature.


Send comments, suggestions, bug reports to Yanto Suryono