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What is the best vector graphics programming language (similar to Asymptote)? I'd like to be able to control 3D rendering parameters such as lighting, perspectives, material (optics, textures). Asymptote seems to be a good choice but I am not sure whether it can do, or has the potential to do, all of the above, and whether there are other better ones. Thanks a lot in advance!

Shuodao
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  • I guess that, if you ask this question on a LaTeX forum, the answer is asymptote. If you do not care about LaTeX, then there will most likely be other choices. If they are better and/or free to use, I don't know. Notice also that your question may be identified as "opinion based", so I'd like to urge you to present a concrete example in which (you feel that) asymptote does a bad job. –  Sep 28 '18 at 19:53
  • @marmot Thanks again for your reply! You rock! I guess I don't really care about whether or not it can be integrated with TeX. I ask in this community because I think people are nice here and are more likely to explore things like this. I've read another discussion and found that Asymptote is probably the best if I want to integrate with TeX. I've closed this question and will ask a new one to better reflect the thing that I am not sure about. I'd appreciate your help again! – Shuodao Sep 29 '18 at 04:15
  • I know you said you want vector graphics, but my go-to choice when I need control over lighting and textures is the open source POV-Ray ray-tracing program. It's raster but you control the resolution. You can use Imagemagick for supersampling of the output to get rid of aliasing. See my answer at the following link for an example. – James Oct 03 '18 at 11:21
  • Oops, here's the link. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/281002/drawing-complicated-3d-designs-within-tikz/282024#282024 – James Oct 03 '18 at 12:40

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