A surface plot is a representation of a 3-D dataset. It shows the functional relationship between two independent variables such as X and Z and a designated dependent variable Y.
- It is said to be a companion plot to the contour plot.
- It is similar to a wireframe plot but in wireframe, each face is filled with a polygon.
- It is helpful in creating the topology of the surface which is begin visualized.
Creating 3-D surface Plot
To create 3-D surface plot ax.plot_surface() function is used
Syntax
ax.plot_surface(X, Y, Z)Here, X and Y are 2-D arrays of points while Z is the 2-D array of heights.
Some of the attributes are given below:
- facecolor: It is used to represent the face colour of the individual surface.
- shade: It is used to shade the face colour.
- color: It is used to represent the colour of the surface.
- vmax: It is used to represent the maximum value of the map.
- vmin: It is used to represent the minimum value of the map.
- cmap: It is used to represent the colormap of the surface.
- nrom: It acts as an instance to normalize the values of color map.
- rcount: It is used to represent the number of rows to be used. By default it is set to 50.
- ccount: It is used to represent the number of columns to be used. By default it is set to 50.
- rstride: It is used to represent the array of row stride(that is step size).
- cstride: It is used to represent the array of column stride(that is step size).
Example
from mpl_toolkits import mplot3d
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
a=np.outer(np.linspace(-2,6,10),np.ones(10))
b=a.copy().T
c=(np.cos(a)+np.cos(b))
fig = plt.figure()
ax = plt.axes(projection ='3d')
ax.plot_surface(a,b,c)
plt.show()Output
