Which toolboxes, apps or packages are required/suitable for designing 3d surfaces in MATLAB?

I'm considering designing footwear in MATLAB. Since there are no equations to decribe the surfaces, I will need another method for generating the 3d surface plots from data points. I also need to create user-customized grids and geodisics for the surfaces. Aside from built-in functions like "delaunaytriangulation" and "griddata", what sorts of tools are available for such design?

Answer 1

[Pratyush Swain]

Hi Mike,

For your usecase, I feel these toolboxes and functions can be helpful:

1 - MATLAB Base Functions:

a- alphaShape: Creates a bounding area or volume that envelops a set of 3-D points

b- isosurface: Extract surfaces from 3D voxel/volumetric data.

c - surf, mesh, trisurf: Functions for visualizing 3D surfaces.

2 - Curve Fitting Toolbox:

a- fit: This function can fit surfaces to data points using various interpolation and smoothing methods.

b- curve fit app: The app provides a graphical interface for interactively fitting curves and surfaces to data.

3 - Computer Vision Toolbox:

a- pcshow: Displays points using the locations and colors stored in the point cloud object.

b-pcfitplane: Fits a plane to a point cloud.

4 - PDE Toolbox:

a- generateMesh, solvepde, geometryFromMesh: Create custom meshes and solve surface-based problems

For more information on some of above mentioned tools, please refer to following links:

1- https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/alphashape.html

2- https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/isosurface.html

3- https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/mesh.html

4- https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/trisurf.html

5- https://www.mathworks.com/help/curvefit/curvefitter-app.html

6- https://www.mathworks.com/help/vision/ref/pcshow.html

7- https://www.mathworks.com/help/pde/ug/pde.pdemodel.geometryfrommesh.html

Hope this helps.