[R] lattice: wireframe "eats up" points; how to make points on wireframe visible?

[Marius Hofert]

Dear Deepayan,

thank you very much, this works great.

Cheers,

Marius

On 2011-04-01, at 13:58 , Deepayan Sarkar wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 3:26 AM, Marius Hofert <m_hofert at web.de> wrote:
>> Dear Deepayan,
>> 
>> thanks for answering. It's never too late to be useful.
>> 
>> I see your point in the minimal example. I checked the z-axis limits in my
>> original problem for the point to be inside and it wasn't there. I can't easily
>> reproduce it from the minimal example though. I'll get back to you if I run into
>> this problem again.
>> 
>> In the example below, both points are shown. Although one lies clearly below/under
>> the surface, it looks as if it lies above. One would probably have to plot this
>> point first so that the wire frame is above the point. But still, this is
>> misleading since the eye believes that the wireframe is *not* transparent. This
>> happens because the lines connecting (0,1,0)--(1,1,0)--(1,0,0) [dashed ones] are
>> not completely visible [also not the one from (1,1,0) to (1,1,1)]. How can I make
>> them visible even if they lie behind/under the wireframe? I tried to work with
>> col="transparent" and with alpha=... but neither did work as I expected.
>> My goal is to make the small "rectangles" between the wire transparent.
>> I also use these plots in posters with a certain gradient-like background color
>> and so it's a bit annoying that the "rectangles" are filled with white color.
> 
> Yes, that probably needs a new argument; the default computation is a
> bit of a hack. You can try the following workaround for now:
> 
> wireframe(z~x*y, pts=pts, aspect=1, scales=list(col=1, arrows=FALSE),
>          zlim=c(0,1),
>          par.settings = list(background = list(col = "#ffffff11")), ## <- NEW
>          panel.3d.wireframe = function(x,y,z,xlim,ylim,zlim,xlim.scaled,
>                                        ylim.scaled,zlim.scaled,pts,...){
>              panel.3dwire(x=x, y=y, z=z, xlim=xlim, ylim=ylim, zlim=zlim,
>                           xlim.scaled=xlim.scaled, ylim.scaled=ylim.scaled,
>                           zlim.scaled=zlim.scaled, ...)
>              panel.3dscatter(x=pts[,1], y=pts[,2], z=pts[,3],
>                              xlim=xlim, ylim=ylim, zlim=zlim,
>                              xlim.scaled=xlim.scaled, ylim.scaled=ylim.scaled,
>                              zlim.scaled=zlim.scaled, type="p", col=c(2,3),
>                              cex=1.8, pch=c(3,4), .scale=TRUE, ...)
>          })
> 
> col = "#ffffff00" instead will give you full transparency (but
> "transparent" will not work), and col = "#ffffff77" will be less
> transparent and so on.
> 
> -Deepayan