# Mapmaking Discussion & Philosophy (WIP/Critique) > 3D modeling (map elements and height maps) >  Plotting locations on Matlab 3D sphere

## Tharsoum

Well, I've a 250x3 matrix containing some geographic coordinates locations, where the first column represents the latitude (-90 to 90), the second one longitude (-180 to 180), and the third one is just the radius (for now, I'm not considering altitude, so it's the same value for all). 

I've tried creating a sphere, but I can't see how to plot the points on it. I've also just tried by plotting using sph2cart (for using this I made all latitudes and longitudes positive and running between 0 and 360) and then plot3. This option gives me a "sphere of points" with the correct radius, but wrong locations. Is possible to do this on Matlab? 

The code looks like this:

superdat; % This is the 250x3 matrix of coordinates
[datacbo datacba datacz]=sph2cart(superdat(:,1)*(pi/180),superdat(:,2)*(pi/180),superdat(:,3));
plot3(datacbo,datacba,datacz,'*')

Extra: a plot of the coordinates in 2D-Equirectangular projection

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## Hai-Etlik

Elevation is measured relative to one of the poles, not to the equator.  You probably need to add a quarter turn to all your latitudes to get elevations.

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## johnvanvliet

an old post but this is easy to do in Blender 
a normal everyday CSV file nasa/jpl uses these a LOT 
take for example Jupiters moon Amalthea (j5amalthea.tab) 
from :
EAR_A_5_DDR_STOOKE_SHAPE_MODELS_V1_0 
h t t p : / / sbn.psi.edu/pds/asteroid/EAR_A_5_DDR_STOOKE_SHAPE_MODELS_V1_0/data

j5amalthea.tab
has 2700 lines in this format -- first 10 lines 


```
    0  -90     53.000000
    0  -85     56.033870
    0  -80     60.277550
    0  -75     63.620630
    0  -70     67.513030
    0  -65     71.267010
    0  -60     74.758350
    0  -55     76.839240
    0  -50     81.041340
    0  -45     83.871950
```

Longitude , latitude , and Radii in Kilometers 
now you can just convert this to a flat plain very easy 
it is a 3 band CSV ascii raw file 72 x 37 pixels ( 37 for the odd single pix at the north and south pols )
i use ISIS3 but any program that handles csv files will do 
-- Even EXCEL or OO's Calc or lotus 123
a screenshot in Nip2 

there is a blender plugin for importing the nasa /jpl PDS dem's 
-- see the blenderartists forum and the blended plugin pages 
Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/NASA IMG Importer - BlenderWiki
it opens like this in Blender

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