Creating a surface plot in Illustrator

Good morning, new to this forum.
I have a number of tools for plotting XYZ surface data (Z is the elevation and drives colour), however I'd like to be able to overlay a surface graph on other things, like a visual photo of the area. Illustrator has a number of graph options, but I can't seem to see an XYZ surface option.
Any advice on how to do this with Illustrator or available plug-ins?
Thanks
-John

> I'd like to do it in Illustrator as a graph instead of imported image...
If you are not talking about importing an image (the photo of the object), then what do you mean by "superimpose"?
Also don't know what you mean by "as a graph." Illustrator has a rudimentary graph feature. It's data table can contain three columns, and you can enter color values in one of the columns. But there is no built-in mechanism for using those values to determine the color of a data point.
The best I can decipher what you want to do is this:
You have a 3-column table: X distance, Y distance, ZColorNumber.
You have said that your plotting software
does already have the ability to colorize the XY datapoints according to the values in the Z column.
You now want to simply superimpose the XYZ plot on top of a photo of the object. That should be a simple matter of exporting the plot in any graphic format that Illustrator (or Photoshop) can import, importing it, importing the photo, and aligning the two.
Is that what you're talking about?
Or is there some reason you need to have the three columns of data as live data within Illustrator?
If so, that would not be difficult to do with Javascript. You could:
1. Import the photo.
2. Import (copy, paste) the three columns of data into an ordinary text object as tab-delimited text. The Z column could be expressed in terms of hexidecimal colors, or RGB colors, so long as the expression conforms to the syntax of Illustrator's Javascript color values.
3. Write a script which would:
Use the lower left corner of the photo as the origin.
For each row (paragraph) in the text object:
Use the values of the first column as X distance offsets (either absolute or relative to the photo width)from the origin.
Use the values of the second column as Y distance offsets from the origin.
Create a path (circle, for example) at the XY coordinate pair.
Assign the Z value as the color value of the path.
Is that what you are trying to describe?
JET

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Message Edited by Ben on 12-24-2005 08:03 AM
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