Creating high quality figures of surfaces 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?
 A: Personally I have recently converted to using Asymptote for illustrations. The learning curve may be a bit steep (then again, since you are already familiar with C, maybe not). I am not sure if the output is as high quality as you want though. 
A: The newest version of Mathematica is actually capable of pretty easily producing some remarkably good graphics if you know how to use it.
http://gallery.wolfram.com/all_images/Surfaces
http://members.wolfram.com/jeffb/visualization/klein.shtml
http://members.wolfram.com/jeffb/visualization/index.shtml
A: If you want more interactivity into a free software, you can try Blender.
A: I've done some illustrations and animations with surf.
A: 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.
A: For figures in tex papers, pgf/tikz is usually my go-to package. However, if interactively is a concern, this is certainly not the way to go (tweak, build, tweak, build, ....). It can certainly do high quality ornamented 3d stuff though, e.g.
http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/spherical-and-cartesian-grids/
A: The best quality surfaces that I have seen are on Ken Baker's site: http://sketchesoftopology.wordpress.com/ I think that Ken uses rhino, and he constructs them in space. If you want a 2-d illustration, then you can draw them in fairly high quality using illustrator. I am pretty sure that Ken spent a lot of time learning his system, and I found learning illustrator no easy feat. 
If the geomview software is still available from the deceased geometry center, then you might also try that. 
A: You can easily produce images and even animations of algebraic surfaces and curves on them with Oliver Labs' Surfex sofware:
http://www.surfex.algebraicsurface.net/
This software is easy to use and gives very nice plots such as this one:

(source: oliverlabs.net) 
Some galleries:
http://www.AlgebraicSurface.net
http://www.Calendar.AlgebraicSurface.net
A: The guy on Sketches of Topology which has already been mentioned (it does indeed have some high quality graphics) claims he's used lots of Google SketchUp (proprietary).
http://sketchesoftopology.wordpress.com
This is a very good list of software, most of it at least plots, some of it makes pretty graphics, all of it GPL/OSS as far as I can tell. A few markup languages designed for making mathematical figures are on there as well.
http://orms.mfo.de/
A: Perhaps VTK (the Visualization Toolkit) from Kitware?  You can set up interactive windows to easily shift camera position of 3D surfaces.
VTK
Another suggestion could very well be Paraview:
Paraview
A: Let me (belatedly) endorse @jeremy's answer, now that this question has
been bumped to the front page: Mathematica, Sage, and Matlab all now have pretty high-quality 3D graphics capabilities. Here is a Mathematica example:

          


          

$z^2(z^2-16x)=64y^2$. From the MO question, Names of certain surfaces.


But you might look into how the Hévéa project rendered its impressive images:

          


          

From the MO question, $C^1$ isometric embedding of flat torus into $\mathbb{R}^3$.


