3D Tri-Surf Plots in R

How to make interactive 3D mesh plots in R.

New to Plotly?

Plotly is a free and open-source graphing library for R. We recommend you read our Getting Started guide for the latest installation or upgrade instructions, then move on to our Plotly Fundamentals tutorials or dive straight in to some Basic Charts tutorials.

Basic Tri-Surf Plot

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly(
  x = c(0, 1, 2, 0),
  y = c(0, 0, 1, 2),
  z = c(0, 2, 0, 1),
  i = c(0, 0, 0, 1),
  j = c(1, 2, 3, 2),
  k = c(2, 3, 1, 3),
  facecolor = toRGB(viridisLite::viridis(4))
)

fig

Cube with Different Face Colors

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly(
  x = c(0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1),
  y = c(0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 0),
  z = c(0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1),
  i = c(7, 0, 0, 0, 4, 4, 2, 6, 4, 0, 3, 7),
  j = c(3, 4, 1, 2, 5, 6, 5, 5, 0, 1, 2, 2),
  k = c(0, 7, 2, 3, 6, 7, 1, 2, 5, 5, 7, 6),
  facecolor = rep(toRGB(viridisLite::inferno(6)), each = 2)
)

fig

Helicopter

library(plotly)
library(geomorph)

dest <- "data/chopper.ply"
mesh <- read.ply(dest)
# see getS3method("shade3d", "mesh3d") for details on how to plot

# plot point cloud
x <- mesh$vb["xpts",]
y <- mesh$vb["ypts",]
z <- mesh$vb["zpts",]
m <- matrix(c(x,y,z), ncol=3, dimnames=list(NULL,c("x","y","z")))

# now figure out the colormap
zmean <- apply(t(mesh$it),MARGIN=1,function(row){mean(m[row,3])})

library(scales)
facecolor = colour_ramp(
  brewer_pal(palette="RdBu")(9)
)(rescale(x=zmean))

fig <- plot_ly(
  x = x, y = y, z = z,
  i = mesh$it[1,]-1, j = mesh$it[2,]-1, k = mesh$it[3,]-1,
  facecolor = facecolor,
  type = "mesh3d"
)

fig

What About Dash?

Dash for R is an open-source framework for building analytical applications, with no Javascript required, and it is tightly integrated with the Plotly graphing library.

Learn about how to install Dash for R at https://dashr.plot.ly/installation.

Everywhere in this page that you see fig, you can display the same figure in a Dash for R application by passing it to the figure argument of the Graph component from the built-in dashCoreComponents package like this:

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly() 
# fig <- fig %>% add_trace( ... )
# fig <- fig %>% layout( ... ) 

library(dash)
library(dashCoreComponents)
library(dashHtmlComponents)

app <- Dash$new()
app$layout(
    htmlDiv(
        list(
            dccGraph(figure=fig) 
        )
     )
)

app$run_server(debug=TRUE, dev_tools_hot_reload=FALSE)