Re: [Matplotlib-users] plot_surface does not work

[Damon M. <dam...@gm...>]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Benjamin Root <ben...@ou...> wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 2:08 PM, Chloe Lewis <ch...@be...> wrote:
>>
>> Would it be workable for the default to be proportional to the size of the
>> array passed in? (suggested only because I do that myself, when deciding how
>> coarse an investigative plot I can get away with.)
>>
>> &C
>>
>
> That is pretty much what the PR I was referring to does:
>
> https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/1040
>
> It makes it so that the behavior of both plot_surface and plot_wireframe is
> the same in this respect.  So, by default, the rstride and cstride would be
> 1% of the size of your data array.  This would make the default for the
> recent example be 1, therefore showing every point.  I wonder if a
> logarithmic default would make sense to better handle large data arrays?
>
> Thoughts?
> Ben Root

I hope nobody minds if I chime in here.

I'm in favour of making the defaults a little more intelligent that
what is implemented at present, i.e, a constant stride for any
surface. Any non-trivial scaling law to determine what stride to use
will result in more expected behaviour than what our users are
currently seeing.

Could we do better? Could we have plot_surface try and estimate the
stride based on the 'roughness' of the surface to be plotted? This
method would grind to a halt for very rough surfaces, so we could
default to a scaling law in these cases.

What does everyone think about this approach?

-- 
Damon McDougall
http://www.damon-is-a-geek.com
Institute for Computational Engineering Sciences
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