CATIA Tutorial - Graphics Applications

http://www.cadfamily.com/a/CAD_CAID/CATIA/CATIA-Tutorial---Graphics-Applications_3184.html

Creating 3D animations with METAP OST
Denis Roegel
Abstract
METAPOST can be used to create animations. We
show here an example of animation of polyhedra,
introducing the 3d package.
Introduction
METAPOST (Hobby (1992); see also the description
in Goossens etal. (1997)) is a drawing language very
similar to METAFONT, but whose output is PostScript. METAPOST is especially suited for geometrical and technical drawings, where a drawing can
naturally be decomposed in several parts, related in
some logical way. Knuth is using METAPOST for the
revisions of and additions to The Art Of Computer
Programming (Knuth, 1997), and it is or will be a
component of every standard TEX distribution.
Unfortunately, METAPOST is still quite bare
and the user is only offered the raw power— a little
bit like the TEX user who only has plain TEX at
his/her disposal. The lack of libraries is certainly
due to the infancy of METAPOST (which came in
the public domain at the beginning of 1995) and
thus to the small number of its users.
In this paper, we present a way to produce
animations using METAPOST. The technique is
quite general and we illustrate it through the 3d
package.