TITLE: Creating high quality figures of surfaces
QUESTION [25 upvotes]: I am not sure if this question is suitable for mo, it is more about visualization than math. Anyway, here it is:
What is the best way to visualize a 2-surface in Euclidean space with high quality?
Of course Maple or Matlab produce some grapical output but if one is interested in high quality figures, these methods are insufficient.
I am currently using the following procedure (POV-Ray is a free rendering software based on C): 

produce the surface with Matlab (or C) and store the surface as a triangle mesh.
write out the triangle mesh to a Povray file.
produce parameter curves with Matlab (or C)
write out the parameter curves (as a union of cylinders) to a Povray file.

This produces very nice figures but suffers from a lack of interactivity. For instance the camera position has to be specified a-priori in Povray.
My question: what do you use? Is there a better method?

REPLY [4 votes]: Please excuse me in offering as a possible answer a software that I developed/am developing myself, namely 
asxp 
which stands for "algebraic surface explorer". 
It can 

create living views of an algebraic surface under parameter change, 
produce Floyd-Steinberg dithered grayscale images of surfaces
create images which are cross hatched along the principal directions of curvature
contour images
triangularize surfaces, smoothen and reduce the triangularization
produce STL models ready for 3D printing (with the help of an auxiliary program, "renderstl" that I wrote too)

The program uses QT, CGAL, GNU GTS and CUDA. At the moment it is in late prototypical state and will probably soon be published, maybe as open-source-software.
More information and a demo video is on
http://www.aviduratas.de/asxp.html
Below are two cross-hatched images:
A certain quartic surface:

A torsal algebraic surface (note the straight lines in the cross hatch):

The curves on the cross-hatched surfaces are available in vector form and would therefore be usable for engraving or pen-plotting.