Animating a 3D surface plot

Surface plots are used to generate some great geometrical shapes in R. Readers who have studied calculus will recognize the image generated using the surface plot. In the current recipe, we will introduce readers to surface plots and animation in R. The surface plot is generated using the parametric equations found in any calculus textbook.

Getting ready

In order to plot a surface plot and animate the same, we need to install and load the following two packages in R:

• plotrix3D()

• animation

How to do it…

For the purpose of this recipe, we will first generate a simple surface plot. We will then use an animation package to animate the plot. We have discussed the use of the seq() function to generate data under a 3D histogram.

x = y = seq(0,2*pi, length.out = 100)
z = mesh(x,y)
u = z$x
v = z$y

We can now define the m, n, and o variables using the parametric equation:

m= (sin(u)*sin(2*v)/2)
n = (sin(2*u)*cos(v)*cos(v))
o = (cos(2*u)*cos(v)*cos(v))

We use the surf3D() function...