Dear Experts,


Newbie here, I have some questions before going to explore Inkscape, so please help.

1. I am a CFD engineer, (Computational Fluid Dynamics), I need vectorized mesh output for my publications, what on my hand is mesh files (majorly, points and faces files), points file defines the points coordinates, faces defines how each points are connected, the mesh grid could be 3D. Please use google image to search "CFD mesh", and get an basic idea.
2. Does Inkscape have programming language to handle this?
3. Since I need the mesh to view in a certain angle with a certain camera position, so I hope when the 3D figure is created in Inkscape, I hope I could rotate, pan, and zoom it with incscape, and even define the camera properties in the programming language.

I can do these in Matlab, for example using matlab patch command to define the polygons, however, I found the eps output in matlab, is not "real" eps, that I need, it is something like high resolution PNG file, the background and lines are stilled handled as if using png2eps tools...

Thank you very much for the help.


Daniel Wei

Welcome to InkscapeForum!

I don't clearly understand what you need, but I think I understand enough to say that probably Inkscape cannot do this. I did as you suggest, and searched "CFD mesh" in Google images. Any of those images could be reproduced with Inkscape. And while some would be very challenging to reproduce, and require extremely accomplished skills, I don't think that's exactly what you're asking.

Inkscape doesn't currently have any kind of mesh capability yet. I recently read about an experimental model, but it is probably years away from appearing in a stable release. Although I'm not really clear if what you mean by "mesh" is the same kind of mesh I'm thinking of (like the gradient mesh that I think Adobe Illustrator has).

But it's your item #3 that clenches my "no" response. Inkscape doesn't have any kind of camera, or live action capability. While one can draw 2D images which look like 3D, they in fact always remain 2D. One can zoom and pan with Inkscape, but rotation is only in one plane. Inkscape does not even have animation yet.

All that said, I know very little about programming, Inkscape's programming, or "drawing" by writing the XML or any other code. So it's possible you could use Inkscape for certain parts of this.

For this live camera type of thing, where you want to rotate a 3D object, Blender might work. It's another open source project, and has the 3D capability, as well as animation. Not sure about live camera type of thing, but you could investigate. And I've seen some other graphics programs where you can rotate a 3D object. Or hopefully someone else will be able to point you to the proper graphics app?