Surface plot with matplotlib, Python

Question

I have a nx3 array, lets call it data , where I want the first 2 columns to be x and y coordinates and the 3rd column to be a z coordinate associated with the x and y coordinates in the same row.

I now want to draw a surface plot where the surface intersects all the z coordinates.

I have seen this post but cannot figure it out.

I know that I can use matplotlib's Axes3D and fig.gca(projection='3d') and that it takes 3 nxn arrays, where I think the X and Y arrays can be obtained with X,Y = np.meshgrid(data[:,0],data[:,1]) , but I am not sure how to obtain an nxn Z array if there is only 1 Z coordinate associated with each x and y .

Then, I would like to smoothen the surface, as I am sure a surface with only a few data points will look ugly, and I am only looking to represent the general shape of the data and specific values aren't too important. Thus, is there a way to interpolate between the data points in 2 dimensions to smoothen the graph?

Example data set:

data = np.array([[4260,150,116]
                 [4204,149,1070]
                 [4204,188,470]
                 [4444,140,389]
                 [3255,149,69]
                 [6370,149,1109]
                 [5765,189,3531]])

Answer 1

Try it like this:

x, y, z = data[:,0], data[:,1], data[:,2]
grid_x, grid_y = np.mgrid[min(x):max(x):50j, min(y):max(y):50j]
z = griddata((x, y), z, (grid_x, grid_y), method='cubic')