Date: Mon, 1 Nov 1999 09:01:49 -0600 From: "J. M. Aguiar"Subject: summary on 3D visualization Many thanks to the dozens of people who responded to my rather naive inquiry. It turns out that a number of the major statistical packages can carry out the functions I need, almost as a sideline; I've tallied the recommendations below and included the actual responses following. ArcView 1 Excel (Table Wizard) 1 Ferret (Linux app) 1 JMP Statistics 11 MatLab 11 S-Plus 111 SAS (aaaa!) 11 Sigma Plot 111111 SPSS 11 Statistica 1 Surfer 1 Systat 11 VisAD 1 Sigma Plot looks like the hometown favorite. Here's the actual comments: __ Try Systat. It has a 3D routine that allows you to rotate the display. __ If you like java programming then I suggest using VisAD- it's a java library that requires you to write your own app, though, so if you just want something off-the-shelf then you should look elsewhere. __ For visualizing your 3-d data, try Statistica -- it will do analyses but also has a great graphics program. Most U's have a site license for it, so you really don't have to pay the astronomical price cited in their literature (nearly $1,000). I think you can get it now for close to $200..? __ Sigma Plot can do that. It is not capable to rotate the figure in real time, but it can show it (one step at a time) in any angle you wish. __ Sigmaplot 4 or 5 works quite well - lots of variations on 3-d graphs. Try also "Surfer." __ JMP statistics software has data visualization components that do this. Not sure how well it would work for presentation, but it will print it out. I'm running it on Macintosh, not sure if there is a version for PCs. Hope this helps. __ I've made some 3-d graphs in Sigma Plot. They were simple to make easy to rotate for getting the best perspective. Sigma plot will even do some interpolation from point to point if needed. I know that SAS (proc graph) has 3-d capabilities, and you can visually rotate it but I've never done graphing in SAS. For another project we created 3-d graphs in ARC-VIEW also. __ Matlab will do it for you. You can probably get a student version which will suffice for about $100 at most. Once you learn the package you'll use it everyday, at least I do! __ JMP, a statistics program developed by SAS (now for both mac and windows), will do this, using xyz coordinates. You can spin it any way you want, and I have printed out such 3d plots, However, I am not impressed enough to encourage you to go out and buy the program just for this reason. (But the rest of JMP is great). If you can find someone who's got the program, then definitely it would be worth checking it out. After giving it a try: You can ask it to connect all your points to the origin with lines, and you can also put a box around the whole plot that spins with the axes and points. You can also zoom in or out. __ You ought to examine S-Plus, by Statsci, now a subsidiary of Mathsoft. http://www.mathsoft.com. __ if you have excel, try the table wizard. it has an option for graphing points as a three dimensional surface. __ S-Plus 4.x will do exactly what you need. I know its a big package just for 3D graphs, perhaps your institution owns a copy. The new windows versions of SPlus are easy to use, but very memory-hungry. Good luck. __ Splus (www.mathsoft.com) has a "spin" option for 3D plots that should do what you want. It also will plot x-y-z with lines from z down to x-y plane. Text labesl for plots are a bit flaky, and the price may be a bit high (ca. $500 academic pricing). __ ferret will certainly do it but you might have to learn the command line syntax. Although the gui version may be up to the task. http://ferret.wrc.noaa.gov/Ferret/ Also check out the live access server: http://ferret.wrc.noaa.gov/Ferret/LAS/ferret_LAS.html though this is not installed in an hour. For some fun with 3-d follow the link http://ferret.wrc.noaa.gov/las-bin/LiveAccess and select VRML globe under output and click get data. Oh, this is unix/linux software - and you need to install and compile it.... You can have ferret up and running in about an hour, if you sort of know, what you are doing with make and compilers. But the best there really is There is also a list of software which uses netcdf http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/software.html which contains a lot of plotting software packages. I tried LinkWinds and it looks really cool, but I never really put my own data in there. matlab will do what you want as well - you can get a Student version for $50-100 or so. It is somewhat limitied be really worth it to toy around and do all kinds of not too complicated stuff. __ have you tried systat? it can graph points in 3 dimensions, and allows you to rotate the axis in each dimension. it also allows you to graph the surface of a plane, which gives you lines extending to intercepts. __ Take a look at SPSS v.9 and/or SigmaPlot. Both have the capabilities for which I believe you're looking. __ Are you familiar with SigmaPlot graphing software? It has several options for creating 3D graphs and X-Y-Z data sets are fine. __ I have viewed multidimensional datasets on SAS, Sigmaplot, and SPSS. S-plus is an incredible package for exploratory data analysis. You should have access to one of these tools. I know that SAS and S-plus both have the ability to rotate the data in three dimensions in real time. I am not sure of sigmaplot and SPSS. __ Use Sigma Plot v5.0. You can plot your equations or data via xyz plots. Download the demo version from SPSS web site and see if it fits your needs. Student price is $500.00. __ I know SPSS(version 8 i think) does this __ Thanks again to everyone. Fear me, data points! I am Informed! Huzzah!