.. _example_04:

(4) A 3-D perspective mesh plot
-------------------------------

This example will illustrate how to make a fairly complicated composite
figure. We need a subset of the ETOPO5 bathymetry [1]_ and Geosat geoid
data sets which we will extract from the local data bases using
:doc:`grdraster </grdraster>`. We would like to show a
2-layer perspective plot where layer one shows a contour map of the
marine geoid with the location of the Hawaiian islands superposed, and a
second layer showing the 3-D mesh plot of the topography. We also add an
arrow pointing north and some text. The first part of this script shows
how to do it:

.. literalinclude:: /_verbatim/example_04.txt
   :language: bash

The purpose of the color palette file ``zero.cpt`` is to have the positive topography
mesh painted light gray (the remainder is white). The left side of
Figure shows the complete illustration.

.. figure:: /_images/example_04.*
   :width: 500 px
   :align: center

   3-D perspective mesh plot (left) and colored version (right).

The second part of the script shows how to make the color version of
this figure that was printed in our first article in *EOS Trans. AGU* (8
October 1991). Using :doc:`grdview </grdview>` one can
choose to either plot a mesh surface (left) or a color-coded surface
(right). We have also added artificial illumination from a light-source
due north, which is simulated by computing the gradient of the surface
grid in that direction though the
:doc:`grdgradient </grdgradient>` program. We choose to
use the **-Qc** option in :doc:`grdview </grdview>` to
achieve a high degree of smoothness. Here, we select 100 dpi since that
will be the resolution of our final raster (The EOS raster was 300 dpi).
Note that the size of the resulting output file is directly dependent on
the square of the dpi chosen for the scanline conversion and how well
the resulting image compresses. A higher value for dpi in **-Qc** would
have resulted in a much larger output file. The CPT files were taken
from Section [sec:example\ :sub:`0`\ 2].

.. [1]
   These data are available on CD-ROM from NGDC (www.ngdc.noaa.gov).
