Revision history [back]

To create a 3D Tri-Surf plot in R using plotly and incorporate a color legend, follow these steps:

1. Load the necessary packages - plotly and ggplot2.

library(plotly)
library(ggplot2)

1. Create a data frame with the x, y, z, and color values that will be used in the plot. In the example below, we will use the "volcano" data set that is already available in R.

data(volcano)
x <- 1:nrow(volcano)
y <- 1:ncol(volcano)
z <- as.matrix(volcano)
df <- data.frame(x = rep(x, each = length(y)),
                 y = rep(y, length(x)),
                 z = as.vector(z))

1. Use ggplot2 to create the 3D Tri-Surf plot. In this example, we will interpolate the color of each point based on the height value.

p <- ggplot(df, aes(x, y, z = z, fill = z)) +
     geom_tile(aes(width = 1, height = 1)) +
     scale_fill_gradient(low = "blue", high = "red", na.value = "white")

1. Convert the ggplot object to a plotly object using the ggplotly function.

p <- ggplotly(p)

1. Customize the plot as desired, including adding a color legend.

p %>% 
  layout(scene = list(xaxis = list(title = "X-axis"),
                      yaxis = list(title = "Y-axis"),
                      zaxis = list(title = "Z-axis")),
         colorbar = list(title = "Height",
                         tickvals = c(100, 150, 200, 250),
                         ticktext = c("100", "150", "200", "250")))

This will create a 3D Tri-Surf plot with a color legend that shows the height values of each point in the plot.