在R和gnuplot中为3D图绘制大量的x，y，z点，并在每个时间步提取bmp / gif / png文件

Question

I have large set of x, y, z points (8000 points) where x, and y are fixed and z-coordinates change at each time step (around 100 time steps).Each time step has a separate data file(x,y,z) for each time step. What would be best way to plot these data points for each file to show the change of z-coordinates in time? May be produce 3D surface/scatter plot at each time step and use those gif/bmp files to make a video file. I can use plotting software to plot x, y, z at each time step but that would be tedious to do it 100 times manually. Can you please suggest me a way to do it in R and gnuplot? I want to create picture files like the one linked here. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9267983/stack/1.gif

Thank you

For example my data sets at a particular time = 1.0 min

         4.00      4.00    126.6310
         8.00      4.00    126.3585
        12.00      4.00    126.1797
        16.00      4.00    126.0514
        20.00      4.00    125.8081
        24.00      4.00    125.3174
        28.00      4.00    124.6824
        32.00      4.00    124.0422
        36.00      4.00    123.4376
        40.00      4.00    122.8637
        44.00      4.00    122.4779
        48.00      4.00    122.4673
        52.00      4.00    122.4825
        56.00      4.00    122.2762
        60.00      4.00    122.5483
        64.00      4.00    122.0322
        68.00      4.00    122.5442
        72.00      4.00    122.2031
        76.00      4.00    122.4452
        80.00      4.00    122.3936
        84.00      4.00    122.4258
        88.00      4.00    122.4239
        92.00      4.00    122.4239
        96.00      4.00    122.4226

Answer 1

In R, the 3D option that is best for parametric plotting is the rgl package.

require(rgl)
x=sin( (1:100)/10 )
 y=cos( (1:100)/10 )
 z=(1:100)/100
 lines3d(x,y,z)
 #after rotation with cursor controls
 rgl.postscript("spiral.ps""
 # and conversion to a png file

Give us 50-100 of your points and we can demonstrate with real data!

Answer 2

Based on your sample data, I generated a set of fake data and generated a series of plots and saved them as an individual images (sequentially named). Such images can be converted to animated gif or movie files using ImageMagick, QuickTime Pro, GIMP, or any other capable graphics editor.

Below is my gnuplot code. Note that do-loops are newly introduced in gnuplot version 4.6 and will not work in earlier versions. With an older version of gnuplot, you can use an external shell script to run the same script multiple times while changing the output file name and the data file name to produce the same result.

set term pngcairo
set palette defined ( 0    '#000fff',\
                      0.99 '#000fff',\
                      1    '#90ff70',\
                      1.99 '#90ff70',\
                      2    '#ee0000',\
                      2.99 '#ee0000')
set ticslevel 0
set view 51,120

do for [t=0:29] {
  set output sprintf("%d.png", t)
  splot sprintf("< awk '{if ($2!=prev) print ; prev=$2; print $0}' %d.dat", t) w p pt 7 linecolor palette notitle
}