Question on 3D surface plotting

Hi – this is my first post to such a list, so bear
with me.

I’ve just installed mpl3d and have had success with
the examples shown at http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/mplot3D

We currently don’t have numpy installed and using the
older Numeric, so I used the following instead:

N = 100

x = zeros((N,N),Float)

y = zeros((N,N),Float)

z = zeros((N,N),Float)

u = arange(0,2*pi,2.*pi/N)

v = arange(0,2*pi,2.*pi/N)

for i in range(N):

for j in range(N):

    x[i,j] = cos(u[i])*sin(v[j])

    y[i,j] = sin(u[i])*sin(v[j])

    z[i,j] = cos(v[j])

fig=p.figure()

ax = p3.Axes3D(fig)

ax.plot_surface(x,y,z)

ax.set_xlabel(‘X’)

ax.set_ylabel(‘Y’)

ax.set_zlabel(‘Z’)

fig.add_axes(ax)

p.show()

p.savefig(‘surfacetest’)

p.close()

which worked a treat (apart from the figure not closing on
the first instance …).

However, if I change N to 10, I get the following error
message:

Traceback (most recent call last):

File “test.py”, line 47, in ?

ax.plot_surface(x,y,z)

File "c:\Python24\lib\site-packages\mpl3d\mplot3d.py,
line 921, in plot_surface

norm = normalize(min(shade),max(shade))

ValueError: min() arg is an empty sequence

It seems that if the number of columns or rows is less than
20 than rstride and cstride = 0. This means that the boxes required to make the
polygons in the surface plot won’t be constructed. However, you can get a
3D plot if you use plot_wireframe or plot3D instead with N = 10 (but these
plots aren’t quite as nice as the surface plot would be).

Is there a minimum size of the arrays which plot_surface
will work on? Is there a workaround for smaller examples? I’m looking at
plotting a (smallish) number of time series solutions as a surface.

Cheers, Jane.

Dr Jane * ** * Sexton****

Risk
Research Group

Geospatial
and Earth Monitoring Division

Geoscience********Australia