# Visualizing a 3D volume in Makie: Lighting, smoothness

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/visualizing-a-3d-volume-in-makie-lighting-smoothness/35263>\
**Category:** Visualization\
**Tags:** question, plotting, makie\
**Created:** [February 27, 2020, 11:10pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/visualizing-a-3d-volume-in-makie-lighting-smoothness/35263 "2020-02-27T23:10:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 8

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**Author:** ![c42f](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/c42f/32/52842_2.png) [@c42f](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/c42f)\
**Post date:** [March 8, 2020, 3:38am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/visualizing-a-3d-volume-in-makie-lighting-smoothness/35263/8 "2020-03-08T03:38:43Z")

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Last time I tried this kind of thing I found that interpolating the underlying isosurface to generate the normals using `Interpolations.gradient` worked better than relying on the normals generated by `GLNormalMesh` (which are based on the intermediate mesh).

For code, see the example I posted here:

> [@ANN: Meshing 0.5.0](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-meshing-0-5-0/29034/2):
>
> I thought I’d post here to say that I’ve just used this for some testing and I really appreciated how easy it was to use with Makie and how fast it was at generating isosurfaces. Here’s a pretty picture: (script at this gist [Makie.jl based visualization of 3D 1/f noise · GitHub](https://gist.github.com/c42f/454c1cbaed66354b77912a1cf41a0d96))

(code available at [Makie.jl based visualization of 3D 1/f noise · GitHub](https://gist.github.com/c42f/454c1cbaed66354b77912a1cf41a0d96))

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