{"id":402,"date":"2023-10-31T07:30:53","date_gmt":"2023-10-31T11:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/graphics-and-apps\/?p=402"},"modified":"2023-10-31T09:11:22","modified_gmt":"2023-10-31T13:11:22","slug":"gourds-to-graphics-the-matlab-pumpkin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/graphics-and-apps\/2023\/10\/31\/gourds-to-graphics-the-matlab-pumpkin\/","title":{"rendered":"Gourds to Graphics: The MATLAB Pumpkin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"
\n<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Guest Writer: Eric Ludlam<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Today's graphics adventure is written by Eric Ludlam, development manager of MATLAB's Charting team. Eric has a whopping 27 years of experience working in MATLAB Graphics, starting in MATLAB 5.0! Eric is renowned within MathWorks for his love of trebuchets, catapults and Punkin Chunkin<\/em><\/a>. His exceptional graphics demos have appeared in MathWorks' Community blog, MATLAB blog, and in MATLAB social media feeds. Today he answers the collective question we all have. How'd you do that?<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n
The MATLAB social media team has been sharing images and code for different pumpkins around Halloween time for the past couple years, and these gourds have been pretty popular. One question asked in the comments was how the pumpkin was designed. Today I'd like to explain the types of decisions made while developing the code and share some fun tricks with vectorization and implicit expansion for anyone just learning how to write efficient code in MATLAB.<\/div>\n
The pumpkin I'd like to use today is a speckled yellow and orange pumpkin I picked up locally here in Massachusetts. Here's a picture of our target pumpkin:<\/div>\n
\"speckled_pumpkin.jpg\"<\/div>\n
There are a few interesting features of this pumpkin, including a stubby little stem, 2 sets of creases\/bumps, a 2-tone color scheme where the 2nd color is in the deeper crease, and speckles. A bunch of fun challenges!<\/div>\n
Before we start let's review the various components of our algorithm. We can break the overall shape of our pumpkin into 2 major parts, the semi-spherical pumpkin part, and the stem.<\/div>\n
The algorithm for the pumpkin part is made of 3 key components which will be combined together into one set of matrices drawn with the surf<\/span> command.<\/div>\n