February 16, 2008 will

Easy as Pie

To further my bid for the worlds dullest hobby award, I have been creating pie charts. I wanted to investigate generating Povray scene description files with Python. It turns out to be a winning combination; it didn't take long to build a system where I can generate a scene containing pie segments of various colors and angles. I can also vary the height and explode individual pie segments. Povray can render very high quality scenes so this system could be used to make pie charts for television or print.

pie

I will experiment with other charts, bar charts etc. Maybe I'll even generate an animation with it.

This isn't entirely just for the heck of it. I plan to write an article about it for the Python magazine.

Use Markdown for formatting
*Italic* **Bold** `inline code` Links to [Google](http://www.google.com) > This is a quote > ```python import this ```
your comment will be previewed here
gravatar
dazzawazza

hehe, that looks awesome. I look forward to reading your article dude. Don't forget to do the next part of the facebook app in Turbogears as well ;)

gravatar
Will

Its already up. Thank goodness for weekends. :-)

gravatar
SwitchBL8

Very smart use of POVray, and it makes pie charts not dull :-) I like 3D rendering/modelling very much (although I'm not very good at it) so you've got my full attention.

gravatar

[...] just spend a couple of hours dusting off an old project of mine, that involved generating pretty 3D pie charts by combining Mako templates with the Povray scene description language. I improved the image [...]

gravatar

[...] Rendu 3D de graphiques: génération de camemert via Python+PovRay , c’est complètement j’té mais j’aime bien [...]