Plotting straight surface with lattice::wireframe()

Question

Assume I want to plot the following dataframe:

df <- data.frame(expand.grid(1:10,1:10),rep(10,100))
colnames(df) <- c("x","y","z")

with the lattice wireframe() function:

wireframe(z~x*y,df,colorkey=TRUE,drape=TRUE)

How do I get it to plot the given coordinates? I would assume it has something to do with having to scale/adjust the z-axis as the automatic scaling within wireframe is probably confused by all z-coordinates being equal.

Answer 1

Just add a zlim argument.

wireframe(z~x*y,df,colorkey=TRUE,drape=TRUE, zlim=c(0,20))

Answer 2

This is from the help page scales section: "The most common use for this argument is to set arrows=FALSE, which causes tick marks and labels to be used instead of arrows being drawn (the default)." So just add that as a list value to 'scales':

wireframe(z~x*y,df,colorkey=TRUE,drape=TRUE,
          scales=list(arrows=FALSE), zlim=c(0,10.1))

The failure of wireframe to display anything when the plotted plane is at one of the extremes seems to be at least "unexpected behavior" if not a bug. I suspect you would not see this in real data. Your use of drape doesn't make much sense since the entire data-plane plane gets displayed at the white midpoint. (Again this is probably not a problem if you have something other than this pathological example.)