Axis | Data Type\n-------------------\nX | Date value\nY | Float value\nZ | Float value<\/code><\/pre>\nHow can I achieve this?<\/p>\n
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I just saw that you pointed out one of your dimensions is a date. In that case,\u00a0have a look at Jeff Ryan’s chartSeries3d<\/a>\u00a0which is designed to chart 3-dimensional time series. Here he shows the yield curve over time:<\/p>\n![\"chartSeries](\"http:\/\/www.quantmod.com\/examples\/chartSeries3d\/chartSeries3d-thumb.png\")
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Original Answer:<\/em><\/p>\nAs 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\u00a0find the spatial view helpful for this<\/a>.<\/p>\nThere are two primary R packages for 3D plotting:\u00a0rgl<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0(or you can use the related\u00a0misc3d<\/a>\u00a0package) andscatterplot3d<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\nrgl<\/strong><\/p>\nThe rgl package uses OpenGL to create interactive 3D plots (read more on the rgl website<\/a>). Here’s an example using the\u00a0surface3d<\/code>\u00a0function:<\/p>\nlibrary(rgl)\ndata(volcano)\nz <- 2 * volcano # Exaggerate the relief\nx <- 10 * (1:nrow(z)) # 10 meter spacing (S to N)\ny <- 10 * (1:ncol(z)) # 10 meter spacing (E to W)\nzlim <- range(y)\nzlen <- zlim[2] - zlim[1] + 1\ncolorlut <- terrain.colors(zlen,alpha=0) # height color lookup table\ncol <- colorlut[ z-zlim[1]+1 ] # assign colors to heights for each point\nopen3d()\nrgl.surface(x, y, z, color=col, alpha=0.75, back=\"lines\")<\/code><\/pre>\nThe 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:<\/p>\n
colorlut <- heat.colors(zlen,alpha=1) # use different colors for the contour map\ncol <- colorlut[ z-zlim[1]+1 ] \nrgl.surface(x, y, matrix(1, nrow(z), ncol(z)),color=col, back=\"fill\")<\/code><\/pre>\nIn 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:<\/p>\n
![\"3D](\"http:\/\/i45.tinypic.com\/12637gy.jpg\")
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scatterplot3d<\/strong><\/p>\nscatterplot3d is a little more like other plotting functions in R (read the vignette<\/a>). Here’s a simple example:<\/p>\ntemp <- seq(-pi, 0, length = 50)\nx <- c(rep(1, 50) %*% t(cos(temp)))\ny <- c(cos(temp) %*% t(sin(temp)))\nz <- c(sin(temp) %*% t(sin(temp)))\nscatterplot3d(x, y, z, highlight.3d=TRUE,\n col.axis=\"blue\", col.grid=\"lightblue\",\n main=\"scatterplot3d - 2\", pch=20)<\/code><\/pre>\n