Parametric Surfaces

Introduction

A parametric surface is a 3-dimensional surface defined by a set of parametric equations with two parameters. These equations map points in some 2-dimensional space (the domain) to the position vectors of the points on the 3-dimensional surface . This parametric representation can be written:

The vectors , and are the basis vectors of the 3-dimensional space that the surface is embedded in. For Cartesian coordinates in the normal Euclidean space these are the familiar X, Y and Z axes.

For example, the parametric representation of a cone is:

So the parametric equations are:



And the domain is:


And here it is (with limited to the interval -2 to +2):

See Also

Last update: 2016-09-25