Interpolation of z
values occurs in two situations:
- When calculating how far along the edge of a quad (or corner-masked corner) a contour line intersects it.
- When calculating the
z
value of the central point of quad. This is needed for all quads ifquad_as_tri=True
or just saddle quads ifquad_as_tri=False
(seealgorithm_description
about saddle quads).
The default for all algorithms is linear z-interpolation, but serial
and threaded
support the use of a ~contourpy.ZInterp
enum that contains other possibilities.
Note
Currently the only members of ~contourpy.ZInterp
are ZInterp.Linear
and ZInterp.Log
.
To use alternative z-interpolation, pass the z_interp
keyword argument to ~contourpy.contour_generator
. A string name can be used instead of the enum member so the following are equivalent:
>>> contour_generator(z_interp="Log", ...) >>> contour_generator(z_interp=ZInterp.Log, ...)
When might logarithmic z-interpolation be appropriate? When contour levels are exponentially distributed, as exponential and logarithm are inverse transforms.
The example below has a coarse rotated grid where z = np.exp(6*y)
and the contour levels [0.3, 1, 3, 10, 30, 100]
increase exponentially. Using linear z-interpolation the contour lines are jagged, using logarithmic z-interpolation the contour lines are straight and at constant y
, as expected.
from contourpy import contour_generator, ZInterp from contourpy.util.mpl_renderer import MplRenderer as Renderer import numpy as np
n = 4 angle = 0.4 # Radians.
# Rotated grid. x, y = np.meshgrid(np.linspace(0.0, 1.0, n), np.linspace(0.0, 1.0, n)) rot = [[np.cos(angle), np.sin(angle)], [-np.sin(angle), np.cos(angle)]] x, y = np.einsum('ji,mni->jmn', rot, np.dstack([x, y]))
# z is exponential in y. z = np.exp(6*y) levels = [0.3, 1, 3, 10, 30, 100]
renderer = Renderer(ncols=2, figsize=(8, 4))
- for ax, z_interp in enumerate([ZInterp.Linear, ZInterp.Log]):
renderer.grid(x, y, ax=ax) cont_gen = contour_generator(x, y, z, z_interp=z_interp) for i, level in enumerate(levels): lines = cont_gen.lines(level) renderer.lines(lines, cont_gen.line_type, ax=ax, color=f"C{i}", linewidth=2) renderer.z_values(x, y, z, ax=ax) renderer.title(z_interp, ax=ax)
renderer.show()
Note
The difference is much less pronounced on a finer (higher resolution) grid, which can be confirmed by increasing the grid resolution n
.