[Blindmath] Understanding how to draw 3D objects

[Andrew Stacey]

It's probably just going to muddy the waters to say that that isn't a true
rendering of a torus.  The outer boundary shouldn't be an ellipse.  I know
because I've spent ages working out the formula in order to draw a more
realistic version of a torus.

The first time that I drew a torus in LaTeX then I did it the mathematically
correct way: I drew a lot of circles and rotated them around a larger circle.
This produces a really nice looking torus, but takes a significant amount of
time to generate.  The second time then I did it by creating a mesh and
drawing the rectangles.  However, I still doubt that either of these would be
in any way accessible to someone who had no conception of what the picture was
meant to represent.

The pictures that I'm talking about are available on my webpage.  They are
probably not accessible in any shape or form.

The first torus is part of this picture:

http://www.math.ntnu.no/~stacey/documents/smooth.1-1.svg

The second is part of this picture:

http://www.math.ntnu.no/~stacey/documents/smooth_chern.3-1.svg

Andrew