# Draw an isosurface with Python Plotly with the help of Pyvista

Posted on January 25, 2022 by Stéphane Laurent

Plotly isosurfaces are relatively new. I have not tried yet in Python. I tried in R and I found them a bit slow. In this post I showed how to plot an isosurface in R Plotly with the help of the misc3d package: by constructing a triangular 3D mesh and using the mesh3d type in Plotly. Here I will show how to do something similar in Python, with the help of the PyVista package. I don’t know whether this is faster than the built-in way to draw an isosurface in Plotly, but there’s at least one advantage: the one I mentioned here, that is, the possibility to clip the isosurface to a region (usually a ball). I don’t think this is possible with the Plotly way (I may be wrong).

Let’s go. I gonna draw the Togliatti surface again. First, the mesh clipped to a box:

from math import sqrt
import numpy as np
import pyvista as pv
import plotly.graph_objects as go
import plotly.io as pio # to save the graphics as html

def f(x, y, z):
return (
64
* (x - 1)
* (
x**4
- 4 * x**3
- 10 * x**2 * y**2
- 4 * x**2
+ 16 * x
- 20 * x * y**2
+ 5 * y**4
+ 16
- 20 * y**2
)
- 5
* sqrt(5 - sqrt(5))
* (2 * z - sqrt(5 - sqrt(5)))
* (4 * (x**2 + y**2 - z**2) + (1 + 3 * sqrt(5)))**2
)
# generate data grid for computing the values
X, Y, Z = np.mgrid[(-5):5:250j, (-5):5:250j, (-4):4:250j]
# create a structured grid
grid = pv.StructuredGrid(X, Y, Z)
# compute and assign the values
values = f(X, Y, Z)
grid.point_data["values"] = values.ravel(order = "F")
# compute the isosurface f(x, y, z) = 0
isosurf = grid.contour(isosurfaces = [0])
mesh0 = isosurf.extract_geometry()

Now we clip the Togliatti surface to a ball. The mesh we obtain is named mesh. It is triangular: mesh.is_all_triangles returns True. If it were not, we would need to run mesh.triangulate. Finally we extract the triangular faces from this mesh. The easiest way is to reshape the vector mesh.faces to a matrix.

# surface clipped to the ball of radius 4.8, with the help of clip_scalar:
mesh0["dist"] = np.linalg.norm(mesh0.points, axis = 1)
mesh = mesh0.clip_scalar("dist", value = 4.8)
mesh.is_all_triangles # True
# mesh.triangulate()
points = mesh.points
triangles = mesh.faces.reshape(-1, 4)

Now it’s a child game to plot the isosurface with Plotly:

fig = go.Figure(data=[
go.Mesh3d(
x=points[:, 0],
y=points[:, 1],
z=points[:, 2],
colorscale = [[0, 'gold'],
[0.5, 'mediumturquoise'],
[1, 'magenta']],
# Intensity of each vertex, which will be interpolated and color-coded
intensity = np.linspace(0, 1, len(mesh.points)),
# i, j and k give the vertices of the triangles
i = triangles[:, 1],
j = triangles[:, 2],
k = triangles[:, 3],
showscale = False
)
])

fig.show()