I want to plot a sequence of cones using tikz. My cones have arbitary coordinates that I calculated beforehand. For n cones, I have the coordinates of n+1 circles, each as a tuple of (depth, center, radius). The circles all lay in the X-Y plane.
I have something like this in mind:
I like the cross sections, as they provide an impression of depth. This is an illustration for an undergrad thesis, if you have suggestions feel free to comment. A cross section (in the X-Z plane) will be next to ist, with proper axes and units. This is just there to provide a proper 3D impression.
To explain a bit more: I don't want the code (after all, I did not give any coordinates..) but I saw this in the manual:
The second way of specifying points is to put them in an external file. Currently, the only format that TikZ allows is the following: Each line of the file should contain one line starting with two numbers, separated by a space. Anything following the two numbers on the line is ignored.
Now I would like to read arbitrary data from file. Something like (depth, center_x, center_y, radius) or so, whatever is easiest to read by tikz. I have not done this before and would be particularly interested in getting the values from a file into the foreach loop if tikz. I think I can handle the actual plotting from there.