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Plotting A 3d Surface Plot With Contour Map Overlay, Using R - Stack Overflow

The document discusses plotting a 3D surface plot with a contour map overlay using R. It provides two approaches: 1) Using the rgl package, create an interactive 3D surface plot of the data and add a transparent contour map underneath using a different color scheme. 2) Using the scatterplot3d package, create a simple 3D surface plot and overlay the contour map image on top, with the R-Wiki providing guidance on creating transparent overlays. The answer notes that dates in one dimension will need to be handled properly and references another package for plotting time series data.

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544 views2 pages

Plotting A 3d Surface Plot With Contour Map Overlay, Using R - Stack Overflow

The document discusses plotting a 3D surface plot with a contour map overlay using R. It provides two approaches: 1) Using the rgl package, create an interactive 3D surface plot of the data and add a transparent contour map underneath using a different color scheme. 2) Using the scatterplot3d package, create a simple 3D surface plot and overlay the contour map image on top, with the R-Wiki providing guidance on creating transparent overlays. The answer notes that dates in one dimension will need to be handled properly and references another package for plotting time series data.

Uploaded by

Alessandro Silva
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Plotting a 3d surface plot with contour map overlay, using R - Stack Ove...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1896419/plotting-a-3d-surface-plot...

Plotting a 3d surface plot with contour map overlay, using R

I have a 3-tuple data set (X,Y,Z points) that I want to plot using R. As the title of my question states, I want to create a surface plot from the data, and superimpose a contour map on the surface plot, so as to create the impression of the contour map being the "shadow" or projection from the surface plot. The contour map is to appear below the surface plot. My data set looks somewhat like this: Axis | Data Type ------------------X | Date value Y | Float value Z | Float value I would be grateful for any pointers on how to achieve this
r 3d statistics plot

edited Dec 13 '09 at 15:52 Shane 27.7k 3 71 115

asked Dec 13 '09 at 12:53 Stick it to THE MAN 1,482 3 26 55 67% accept rate

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Edit: I just saw that you pointed out one of your dimensions is a date. In that case, have a look at Jeff Ryan's chartSeries3d which is designed to chart 3-dimensional time series. Here he shows the yield curve over time:

Original Answer: As I understand it, you want a countour map to be the projection on the plane beneath the 3D surface plot. I don't believe that there's an easy way to do this other than creating the two plots and then combining them. You may find the spatial view helpful for this. There are two primary R packages for 3D plotting: rgl (or you can use the related misc3d package) and scatterplot3d. rgl The rgl package uses OpenGL to create interactive 3D plots (read more on the rgl website). Here's an example using the surface3d function: library(rgl) data(volcano) z <- 2 * volcano # Exaggerate the relief x <- 10 * (1:nrow(z)) # 10 meter spacing (S to N) y <- 10 * (1:ncol(z)) # 10 meter spacing (E to W)

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29/09/2012 23:51

Plotting a 3d surface plot with contour map overlay, using R - Stack Ove...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1896419/plotting-a-3d-surface-plot...

zlim <- range(y) zlen <- zlim[2] - zlim[1] + 1 colorlut <- terrain.colors(zlen,alpha=0) # height color lookup table col <- colorlut[ z-zlim[1]+1 ] # assign colors to heights for each point open3d() rgl.surface(x, y, z, color=col, alpha=0.75, back="lines") The alpha parameter makes this surface partly transparent. Now you have an interactive 3D plot of a surface and you want to create a countour map underneath. rgl allows you add more plots to an existing image: colorlut <- heat.colors(zlen,alpha=1) # use different colors for the contour map col <- colorlut[ z-zlim[1]+1 ] rgl.surface(x, y, matrix(1, nrow(z), ncol(z)),color=col, back="fill") In this surface I set the heights=1 so that we have a plane underneath the other surface. This ends up looking like this, and can be rotated with a mouse:

scatterplot3d scatterplot3d is a little more like other plotting functions in R (read the vignette). Here's a simple example: temp <- seq(-pi, 0, length = 50) x <- c(rep(1, 50) %*% t(cos(temp))) y <- c(cos(temp) %*% t(sin(temp))) z <- c(sin(temp) %*% t(sin(temp))) scatterplot3d(x, y, z, highlight.3d=TRUE, col.axis="blue", col.grid="lightblue", main="scatterplot3d - 2", pch=20) In this case, you will need to overlay the images. The R-Wiki has a nice post on creating a tanslucent background image.
edited Dec 13 '09 at 18:25 answered Dec 13 '09 at 15:12 Shane 27.7k 3 71 115

Thanks very much Shane. I think this is a very good starting point. Incidentally, you may have noticed that one of the axis is chronological (i.e. date). Do I need to do any manipulation before attempting to plot, or will R (or indeed the rgl package), handle the dates correctly? Stick it to THE MAN Dec 13 '09 at 17:44 Hi Shane, thank you very much for your help. You have given me sufficient ammunition to get stsrated with. If I encounter more specific problems, I will be back here with a more specific question. I will mark your answer as accepted. Stick it to THE MAN Dec 14 '09 at 11:13

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