Free Software for Drawing Cubes

[Hornbein]

I'm drawing various fancy cubes. I'm using Octave, which is fine for generating the data but not so great on drawing cubes. (In case you're curious, I'm drawing projections of hypercubes.) Any help?

 

[jedishrfu]

Try processing at processing.org. You'd be coding in java with open gl graphics and can do some amazing things. Drawing cubes shouldn't be too difficult to do depending on what you're trying to do. Its not a drawing tool but a programming environment to do interactive graphical programming with many example programs. A lot of computer artists use it for their work.

Here's an interesting video showing how to construct hypercubes:

 

[zunf]

There is Blender, it's a 3D editor for 3D artists and it uses Python 3.x for everything, you can basically script pretty much anything you want from widgets, extensions, 3D objects and movements .

It's free and multiplatform, also being a 3D editor you can basically render your animation any way you like it ( gif, video, raster ) .

https://www.blender.org/

I'm sure you can even find a tutorial / guide about how to create a tesseract / hypercube just so you can start coding with it .

 

[Hornbein]

Try processing at processing.org. You'd be coding in java with open gl graphics and can do some amazing things. Drawing cubes shouldn't be too difficult to do depending on what you're trying to do. Its not a drawing tool but a programming environment to do interactive graphical programming with many example programs. A lot of computer artists use it for their work.

Here's an interesting video showing how to construct hypercubes:

Blender is way too heavy duty. I'd have to buy a new computer before I could use it at all. I'm not going to spend $1000 or even $500 on this project. And all those features would just get in the way.

So that leaves processing. That seems to be the opposite: it's for hacking around and not serious. I'd have to get a linear algebra package that runs under Java. The first one I found is not supported at all. Java doesn't even support multidimensional arrays! That seems like a bad sign. I've wasted too much time in my life already dicking around with software like this. Beat your head against the wall then give up is the pattern.

So I'm out of luck so far. Pick my poison.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Of course you can work with multi dimensional arrays in Java. But you could also use some other programming language. Use whichever you are most familiar with.
Anyway, if you want to stick with Java you can use the Apache commons math library http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-math/index.html

 

[Hornbein]

Of course you can work with multi dimensional arrays in Java. But you could also use some other programming language. Use whichever you are most familiar with.
Anyway, if you want to stick with Java you can use the Apache commons math library http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-math/index.html

Thanks, my recognition of the Apache brand name boosts my consumer confidence.

 

[Dominik Tugend]

I have seen POV-Ray being used quite a lot in the past for visualizing complicated mathematical shapes, not sure if it's still the way to go though:
http://povray.org/

Edit: Here is some related sample code, I didn't check though if it's correct / fits your needs:
http://www.ms.uky.edu/~lee/visual05/povray/povray.html
http://blog.hypercubed.com/archives/2006/03/20/using-pov-ray-to-display-four-dimensional-objects/
https://www.google.com/search?q=povray+hypercubes

POV-Ray is a ray tracer though, meaning it might be too slow for what you need :-(

You probably made your choice already by now, but I wanted to really mention this software.