lego tiled image (how to make?)

["R.G.S." <rgs1967(at)hotmail.com>]

Greetings all,
I have an satellite data image and I would like to plot it
as a color image composed of small uniform shaded rectangles.
i.e. sort of like IDL> tv,rebin(image,/sample)

This data does need the axis that a surface (or plot) command will give.
So the rebin will not work in general, (or I supoose I could calculate
the  size of the output image, then create the axis appropriate for that)
Also, I will want to plot this as a polar plot in the future, and the rebin
function will nto work for that.


What I (currently) do to plot this data is (surface; rotated to bird's eye
view):

shade_surf, merged,lonbins,latbins,shade = bytscl(merged,/nan),$
     ax=90,az=0,ztickname = strarr(10)+' ',zticklen = 0.0001,/noerase


What I really want is  to create a surface like
surface,image,/lego
and do the above shadesurf command.


What is the best way to create such a figure?
Should I write the code to draw and shade each polygon for each sample
(ugh slow!), or is there already a way to do such a thing?


Cheers,
bob
stockwell at co-ra.com