Guus strikes back with a new Scientific tutorial in the Free OpenGL wikibook. It deals with tracing the Mexican Hat 3D function using surfaces, removing hidden ones, and also shows how to avoid visual artifacts when adding grid lines.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming/Scientific_OpenGL_Tutorial_05
We've been implementing OpenGL plotting in Octave, and this stuff is great. I'll be reading more of this later in order to have a deeper understanding of how to do this.
I have a question. Do you know if there's any hope of getting offscreen plotting in OpenGL without an X server? It would be tremendously useful.
Thanks, - Jordi G. H. jordigh@octave.org
I forwarded your comment to the tutorial author
I don't know if it's possible to use OpenGL without an X server. Since OpenGL is called through X server extensions (GLX), that sounds unlikely, but perhaps there's a way to call the kernel's DRM system directly.
An alternative might be to implement the plotter in OpenCL.