Plotting Spherical Functions edit page

In this chapter various ways of plotting spherical functions are explained. We start by defining some example functions.

% the smiley
sF1 = S2Fun.smiley;

% some osilatory function
f = @(v) 0.1*(v.theta+sin(8*v.x).*sin(8*v.y));
sF2 = S2FunHarmonic.quadrature(f, 'bandwidth', 150);

Smooth Plot

The default plot command generates a colored plot without contours

plot(sF1)
  • plot(sF1) is the same as pcolor(sF1)

Contour Plot

nonfilled contour plot plots only the contour lines

contour(sF1, 'LineWidth', 2);

Filled Contour Plot

filled contour plot plots the contour lines

contourf(sF1, 'LineWidth', 2);

3D Plot

3D plot of a sphere colored accordingly to the function values.

plot3d(sF1);

Surface Plot

3D plot where the radius of the sphere is transformed according to the function values

surf(sF2);

Section Plot

Plot the intersection of the surf plot with a plane defined by a normal vector v

plotSection(sF2, zvector,'color','interp','linewidth',10)
colormap spring
mtexTitle('Flowerpower!')

Spectral Plot

plotting the Fourier coefficients

close all
plotSpektra(sF1,'FontSize',15);

The more specific plot options are covered in the respective classes.