ans =
Main Content
Results for
MAThematical LABor
3%
MAth Theory Linear AlgeBra
12.5%
MATrix LABoratory
84%
MATthew LAst Breakthrough
0%
32 votes
At School / university
64%
At work
30%
At home
3%
Elsewhere
3%
33 votes
Here presented MATLAB code is designed to create a seamless loop animation that visualizes an isosurface derived from random data.
This entry, titled "The Scrambled Predator's Cube", builds upon my previous work and has been adapted to include dynamic elements.
In this explanation, I will break down the relatively short code, making it accessible whether you are a beginner in MATLAB or an experienced user. Let's go through the MATLAB code step by step to understand each line in detail.
Code Breakdown
d = rand(8,8,8);
Random Data Generation: This line creates a three-dimensional array d with dimensions 8×8×8 filled with random values. The rand function generates values uniformly distributed in the interval (0,1). This array serves as the input data for generating the isosurface.
iv = .5 + (f / 10000);
Isovalue Calculation: Here, the isovalue iv is computed based on the frame number f. The expression f / 10000 causes iv to increase very slowly as f increments. Starting from 0.50, this means that for every increment of f, iv changes slightly (specifically, by 0.0001). This gradual increase creates a smooth transition effect in the isosurface over time, making it look dynamic as the animation progresses.
h = patch(isosurface(d, iv), 'FaceColor', 'blue', 'EdgeColor', 'none');
Isosurface Creation: The isosurface function extracts a 3D surface from the data array d at the specified isovalue iv. The result is a patch object h that represents the isosurface in the 3D plot. The 'FaceColor', 'blue' argument sets the face color of the surface to blue, while 'EdgeColor', 'none' specifies that no edges should be drawn, giving the surface a solid appearance.
isonormals(d, h);
Surface Normals Calculation: This function calculates the normals at each vertex of the isosurface h, based on the data in d. Normals are vectors perpendicular to the surface at each point and are crucial for proper lighting calculations. By using isonormals, the appearance of depth and texture is enhanced, allowing the lighting to interact more realistically with the surface.
patch(isocaps(d, iv), 'FaceColor', 'interp', 'EdgeColor', 'none');
Isocaps Visualization: The isocaps function creates flat surfaces (caps) at the boundaries of the isosurface where the data values meet the isovalue iv. The resulting caps are then rendered as patches with 'FaceColor', 'interp', meaning the colors of the caps are interpolated based on the data values. The caps provide a more complete visual representation of the isosurface, improving its overall appearance.
colormap hsv;
Color Map Setup: This line sets the colormap of the current figure to HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value). The HSV colormap allows for a wide range of colors, which can enhance the visual appeal of the rendering by mapping different values in the data to different colors.
daspect([1, 1, 1]);
Aspect Ratio Setting: The daspect function sets the data aspect ratio of the plot to be equal in all three dimensions. This means that one unit in the x-direction is the same length as one unit in the y-direction and z-direction, ensuring that the visual representation of the 3D data is not distorted.
axis tight;
Tight Axis Setting: This command adjusts the limits of the axes so that they fit tightly around the data, removing any excess white space. It helps to focus the viewer's attention on the isosurface and related visual elements.
view(3);
3D View Configuration: The view(3) command sets the current view to a 3D perspective, allowing the viewer to see the structure of the isosurface from an angle that reveals its three-dimensional nature.
camlight right;
camlight left;
Lighting Effects: These commands add two light sources to the scene, positioned to the right and left of the view. The additional lighting enhances the shading and depth perception of the isosurface, making it appear more three-dimensional and visually appealing.
axis off;
Hide Axes: This command turns off the display of the axes in the plot. Removing the axes provides a cleaner visual representation, allowing the viewer to focus solely on the isosurface and its lighting effects without distraction from the grid lines or axis labels.
lighting phong;
Lighting Model: This line sets the lighting model to Phong. The Phong model is widely used in computer graphics as it provides smooth shading and realistic reflections. It calculates how light interacts with surfaces, enhancing the overall appearance by creating a more natural look.
This code creates a visually dynamic and appealing representation of an isosurface derived from random data. The gradual change in the isovalue allows for smooth transitions, while the combination of lighting, colors, and shading contributes to a rich 3D visualization. Each component plays a vital role in rendering the final output, showcasing advanced techniques in data visualization using MATLAB.
There are so many incredible entries created in week 1. Now, it’s time to announce the weekly winners in various categories!
Nature & Space:
Seamless Loop:
Abstract:
Remix of previous Mini Hack entries:
Early Discovery
Holiday:
Congratulations to all winners! Each of you won your choice of a T-shirt, a hat, or a coffee mug. We will contact you after the contest ends.
In week 2, we’d love to see and award more entries in the ‘Seamless Loop’ category. We can't wait to see your creativity shine!
Tips for Week 2:
1.Use AI for assistance
The code from the Mini Hack entries can be challenging, even for experienced MATLAB users. Utilize AI tools for MATLAB to help you understand the code and modify the code. Here is an example of a remix assisted by AI. @Hans Scharler used MATLAB GPT to get an explanation of the code and then prompted it to ‘change the background to a starry night with the moon.’
2. Share your thoughts
Share your tips & tricks, experience of using AI, or learnings with the community. Post your knowledge in the Discussions' general channel (be sure to add the tag 'contest2024') to earn opportunities to win the coveted MATLAB Shorts.
3. Ensure Thumbnails Are Displayed:
You might have noticed that some entries on the leaderboard lack a thumbnail image. To fix this, ensure you include ‘drawframe(1)’ in your code.
I'd like to share some tips about the 2024 mini hack contest, specifically related to audio:
- First (and most important), credit your source: unless you are composing your own audio, I think it's important to give credit to the original sources. It is a little sad to see several contributions with an empty line:
'Cite your audio source here (if applicable):'
- A great place to get royalty-free and high-quality music and audio (among other media) is https://pixabay.com. Be sure to check it out! I used one of their audio clips in my submission EKG pulse
- The right music can enhance the overall experience of your animation. Sometimes getting the animation to match the music beat can be hard. I suggest you try the other way around: get your music/sound effects to match the animation rhythm with a little editing. A free audio editor with many capabilities (more than enough for this contest, I think) is https://www.audacityteam.org/
- Choose a 4-second audio clip with a consistent tempo and seamless loop points, ensuring it complements your animation's mood and loops smoothly over 12 seconds without abrupt changes.
I think that when the right music is paired with the right animation, it can create a more impactful experience.
Well, this is my first time to participate in such community competitions and guess what, I've gone for 4 submissions so far (Feels Great!!)
So I wanna share some tricks that I followed for my first submission named Happy Shaping' ( Go Check it out!!):
1. Dynamic Background Color Change:
- Technique: The background color of the figure window is gradually changed using sine and cosine functions.
- Reason: These trigonometric functions (sin and cos) create smooth, oscillating transitions over time, which gives a fluid effect to the background's color shift.
- Implementation:
Color = [0.1 + 0.5*abs(sin(f/10)), 0.1 + 0.5*abs(cos(f/15)), 0.9 -
0.5*abs(sin(f/20))];
- Benefit: This introduces a smooth, visually appealing animation effect.
2. Smooth Object Motion Using Sine and Cosine:
- Technique: The position and shape of objects are based on trigonometric functions.
- Reason: Using sin(t) and cos(t) ensures that the movement is circular or elliptical, creating continuous and natural motion in animations.
- Implementation (for object position):
x = 10 * cos(t * 2 * pi) * (1 + 0.5 * sin(t * pi));
y = 10 * sin(t * 2 * pi) * (1 + 0.5 * cos(t * pi));
- Benefit: Circular and smooth motions are pleasing and easily controlled by tweaking the frequency and phase of sine/cosine functions.
3. Polygon Shape Changing Over Time:
- Technique: The number of sides of the polygon (sides) changes dynamically based on t.
- Reason: It creates variation in shape, maintaining user interest as the shape transitions from a triangle to a hexagon.
- Implementation:
sides = 3 + round(3 * abs(sin(t)));
- Benefit: This provides dynamic shape transitions over time, keeping the animation non-static.
4. Use of the fill Function for Color-Filled Shapes:
- Technique: The fill function is used to draw a polygon with smoothly changing colors.
- Reason: Filling polygons with varying colors based on time (t) allows for continuous color transitions, adding more complexity to the animation.
- Implementation:
fill(xp, yp, c, 'EdgeColor', 'none');
- Benefit: Combining both color changes and shape changes enhances the visual impact.
5. Consistent Use of hold on and hold off:
- Technique: hold on allows multiple graphic objects to be drawn on the same axes without clearing previous objects.
- Reason: This is crucial for drawing multiple elements (like polygons, circles, and lines) on the same figure.
- Benefit: It helps manage and layer different graphical elements effectively within the same frame.
6. Use of rectangle for a Smooth Ball Motion:
- Technique: The ball's motion is defined by rectangle with a Curvature of [1, 1] to make it circular.
- Reason: Using the rectangle function simplifies the process of drawing a filled circle, and controlling its position and size is intuitive.
- Benefit: It provides a straightforward way to animate circular objects within the plot.
7. Animating the Connection Line:
- Technique: A white dashed line (w--) is drawn between the polygon and the moving ball to show a connection between these objects.
- Reason: This adds interactivity to the scene, as it gives the impression that the polygon and the ball are related or connected in some way.
- Implementation:
plot([x bx], [y by], 'w--', 'LineWidth', 2);
- Benefit: A dynamic element that adds depth and narrative to the animation, guiding the viewer’s attention.
8. Frame Synchronization with Time (f and t):
- Technique: The variable f is used as a frame number, while t = f / 24 creates a link between frame and time.
- Reason: Ensuring smooth and continuous transitions in the animation over time is critical, so f acts as the control for time-based changes in shape, color, and position.
- Benefit: This makes it easy to manage frame rates and time-based updates for the animation.
Over the past week, we have seen many creative and compelling short movies! Now, let the voting begin! Cast your votes for the short movies you love. Authors, share your creations with friends, classmates, and colleagues. Let's showcase the beauty of mathematics to the world!
We know that one of the key goals for joining the Mini Hack contest is to LEARN! To celebrate knowledge sharing, we have special prizes—limited-edition MATLAB Shorts—up for grabs!
These exclusive prizes can only be earned through the MATLAB Shorts Mini Hack contest. Interested? Share your knowledge in the Discussions' general channel (be sure to add the tag 'contest2024') to earn opportunities to win the coveted MATLAB Shorts. You can share various types of content, such as tips and tricks for creating animations, background stories of your entry, or learnings you've gained from the contest. We will select different types of winners each week.
We also have an exciting feature announcement: you can now experiment with code in MATLAB Online. Simply click the 'Open in MATLAB Online' button above the movie preview section. Even better! ‘Open in MATLAB Online’ is also available in previous Mini Hack contests!
We look forward to seeing more amazing short movies in Week 2!
If you like them, please feel free to use them for free.
Try to install MATLAB2024a on Ubuntu24.04. In the image below, the button indicated by the green arrow is clickable, while the button indicated by the red arrow are unclickable, and input field where text cannot be entered, preventing the installation.
Let's say you have a chance to ask the MATLAB leadership team any question. What would you ask them?
hello i found the following tools helpful to write matlab programs. copilot.microsoft.com chatgpt.com/gpts gemini.google.com and ai.meta.com. thanks a lot and best wishes.
We're excited to announce that the 2024 Community Contest—MATLAB Shorts Mini Hack starts today! The contest will run for 5 weeks, from Oct. 7th to Nov. 10th.
What creative short movies will you create? Let the party begin, and we look forward to seeing you all in the contest!
If I go to a paint store, I can get foldout color charts/swatches for every brand of paint. I can make a selection and it will tell me the exact proportions of each of base color to add to a can of white paint. There doesn't seem to be any equivalent in MATLAB. The common word "swatch" doesn't even exist in the documentation. (?) One thinks pcolor() would be the way to go about this, but pcolor documentation is the most abstruse in all of the documentation. Thanks 1e+06 !
What is the side-effect of counting the number of Deep Learning Toolbox™ updates in the last 5 years? The industry has slowly stabilised and matured, so updates have slowed down in the last 1 year, and there has been no exponential growth.Is it correct to assume that? Let's see what you think!
releaseNumNames = "R"+string(2019:2024)+["a";"b"];
releaseNumNames = releaseNumNames(:);
numReleaseNotes = [10,14,27,39,38,43,53,52,55,57,46,46];
exampleNums = [nan,nan,nan,nan,nan,nan,40,24,22,31,24,38];
bar(releaseNumNames,[numReleaseNotes;exampleNums]')
legend(["#release notes","#new/update examples"],Location="northwest")
title("Number of Deep Learning Toolbox™ update items in the last 5 years")
ylabel("#release notes")
As pointed out in Doxygen comments in code generated with Simulink Embedded Coder - MATLAB Answers - MATLAB Central (mathworks.com), it would be nice that Embedded Coder has an option to generate Doxygen-style comments for signals of buses, i.e.:
/** @brief <Signal desciption here> **/
This would allow static analysis tools to parse the comments. Please add that feature!
Dear contest participants,
The 2024 Community Contest—MATLAB Shorts Mini Hack—is just one week away! Last year, we challenged you to create a 48-frame, 2-second animation. This year, we're doubling the fun by increasing the frame count to 96 and adding audio support. Your mission? Create a short movie!
As always, whether you are a seasoned MATLAB user or just a beginner, you can participate in the contest and have opportunities to win amazing prizes.
Timeframe:
- The contest will run for 5 weeks, from Oct. 7th to Nov. 10th, Eastern Time.
General Rules:
- The first week is dedicated to entry creation, and the fifth week is reserved for voting only.
- Create a 96-frame, 4-second animation and add audio. We will loop it 3 times to create a 12-second short movie for you.
- The character limit remains at 2,000 characters.
Prizes
- You will have opportunities to win compelling prizes, including Amazon gift cards, MathWorks T-shirts, and virtual badges. We will give out both weekly prizes and grand prizes.
Warm-up!
With one week left before the contest begins, we recommend you warm up by reading a fantastic article: Walkthrough: making Little Nemo's airship in MATLAB by @Tim. The article shares both technical insights and the challenges encountered along the way.
The MATLAB Central Community Team
See the attached PDF for a higher resolution
Related blogs posts:
Local large language models (LLMs), such as llama, phi3, and mistral, are now available in the Large Language Models (LLMs) with MATLAB repository through Ollama™!
Read about it here:
Hot off the heels of my High Performance Computing experience in the Czech republic, I've just booked my flights to Atlanta for this year's supercomputing conference at SC24.
Will any of you be there?
syms u v
atan2alt(v,u)
function Z = atan2alt(V,U)
% extension of atan2(V,U) into the complex plane
Z = -1i*log((U+1i*V)./sqrt(U.^2+V.^2));
% check for purely real input. if so, zero out the imaginary part.
realInputs = (imag(U) == 0) & (imag(V) == 0);
Z(realInputs) = real(Z(realInputs));
end
As I am editing this post, I see the expected symbolic display in the nice form as have grown to love. However, when I save the post, it does not display. (In fact, it shows up here in the discussions post.) This seems to be a new problem, as I have not seen that failure mode in the past.
You can see the problem in this Answer forum response of mine, where it did fail.
You can also select a web site from the following list
Americas
- América Latina (Español)
- Canada (English)
- United States (English)
Europe
- Belgium (English)
- Denmark (English)
- Deutschland (Deutsch)
- España (Español)
- Finland (English)
- France (Français)
- Ireland (English)
- Italia (Italiano)
- Luxembourg (English)
- Netherlands (English)
- Norway (English)
- Österreich (Deutsch)
- Portugal (English)
- Sweden (English)
- Switzerland
- United Kingdom(English)
Asia Pacific
- Australia (English)
- India (English)
- New Zealand (English)
- 中国
- 日本Japanese (日本語)
- 한국Korean (한국어)