There were some errors in your attempt to convert my routine to real Mathcad.
The data structure necessary to plot a number of points in Mathcads 3D plot is nested vector. A 3 x 1 vector whose elements are n x 1 vectors consisting of the x, y and z coordinates of the points to be plotted.
A possible conversion would be this
But unfortunately the result will not work in Mathcads 3D plot component because good old Mathcad has a severe limitation here. The 3D plot does not accepts NaN's and throws an error. I had uses NaN two separate line segments. Its one of the very few advantages of Prime that its 3D plot accepts NaN's the same way as Mathcads 2D plot does. Otherwise Primes plotting capabilities are mediocre up to useless.
You could omit those NaN's but now ALL points will be connected. The end of a line segment will be connected to the start of the next one. usually this will mean quite a lot of unwanted line segments being plotted.
At the time I can't think of a solution other than arranging the input data in such a way that the end of a segment is the start of the next one - maybe by drawing some segments multiple times. I guess this will not be possible in every case. Here is a routine which omits the NaN's and you can see the additional line segments if you compare with the Prime version.
Thanks Werner.
much appreciated for the alternative solution and your explanation regarding your coding.
yes, I started to realize that the main issue was not really the coding but the limitation of old mathcad. it certainly became a bit more obvious after reading the help and to realize that NaN was only acceptable in 2D plots 😞
Though, here is my take on your solution.
Instead of using the NaN, I replace it with a coordinate located at "INFINITY". This forces the unwanted lines to go to infinity and back to start the next line. Further if we change the plotting limit to the magnitude of your real X,Y,Z values. The unwanted lines will be shown cut-off thus making the 3D truss plot to look a bit more like the real thing.
Additionally we can use the artifice of OPTICAL ILLUSION by rotating the plot so that the unwanted lines are along our line of sight, thus making the unwanted lines looks as a POINT.
This can be achieved ether by either change the ANGLE (variable "ang") to match the plot rotation, keeping the angle constant and rotating the plot or a combination of both.
Cheers!
