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Python Mayavi - set size of scatter point

I've a very simply script with which I'm trying to plot 2 points with a set size:
from mayavi.mlab import *
x = [0.,3.]
y = [0.,0.]
z = [0.,0.]
scalars = [1.5,1.5]
pts = points3d(x, y, z, scalars, scale_factor = 1)
However, I can't figure out how, with this simple example, to set the size of the two points so that the points just touch each other. I want to set the size in the same units as the coordinates of the points. So I separate the two points by 3 units and set the size of the two points to 1.5.
However, in the image attached, the two points don't touch like expected.
Any idea why?

In mayavi, the scale of spheres determines their diameter and not their radius.
Use
pts = points3d(x, y, z, scalars, scale_factor=2, resolution=100)
the resolution argument makes a smoother sphere (number of angular points). Beware of high values of resolutions if you intend to display many spheres.

Masking a 3D numpy array with a tilted disc

I'm working in Python2.7 with 3D numpy arrays, and trying to retrieve only pixels who fall on a 2D tilted disc.
Here is my code to plot the border of the disc (= a circle) I am interested in
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
#creating a 3d numpy array (empty in this example, but will represent a binary 3D image in my application)
space=np.zeros((40,40,20))
r = 8 #radius of the circle
theta = np.pi / 4 # "tilt" of the circle
phirange = np.linspace(0, 2 * np.pi) #to make a full circle
#center of the circle
center=[20,20,10]
#computing the values of the circle in spherical coordinates and converting them
#back to cartesian
for phi in phirange:
x = r * np.cos(theta) * np.cos(phi) + center[0]
y= r*np.sin(phi) + center[1]
z= r*np.sin(theta)* np.cos(phi) + center[2]
space[int(round(x)),int(round(y)),int(round(z))]=1
x,y,z = space.nonzero()
#plotting
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
ax.scatter(x, y, z, zdir='z', c= 'red')
plt.show()
The plot gives the following figure :
which is a good start, but now I want a way to retrieve only the values of the pixels of space which are located in the disc defined by the circle : the ones in the pink zone in the following image (in my application, space will be a 3D binary image, here it is numpy.zeros() just to be able to plot and show you the disc I want):
How should I procede ?
I guess there is some numpy masking involved, an I understand how you would do it in 2D (like this question) but I'm having trouble applying this to 3D.

One easy way would be to calculate the normal vector to your disc plane. You can use your spherical coordinates for that. Be sure not to add the centre, set phi at zero and swap cos and sin theta, also stick a minus sign to the sin.
lets call that vector v. The plane is given by v0*x0 + v1*x1 + v2*x2 == c you can calculate c by inserting a point from your circle for x.
Next you can make a 2d grid for x0 and x1 and solve for x2. this gives you the height x2 as a function of the x0, x1 mesh. for these points you can calculate the distance from your disc centre and discard the points that are too far off. This you would indeed do using a mask.
Finally, depending on how precisely you want to plot you could round the x2 values to grid units, but for example for a surface plot I wouldn't do that.
To get a 3d mask as you describe you would round x2 and then starting from an all zero space set the disc pixels using space[x0, x1, x2] = True. This assumes that you have masked x0, x1, x2 as described earlier.

Well that is a math problem, you should ask it in the Mathematics Stack Exchange site.
From my perspective, you should first find the surface your disc is in, and do the area calculation within that surface, by, for example, the method you mentioned in the linked question.
numpy or matplotlib here definitely do not responsible for the projection, you do.
Without clearly point out which (or which kind of) surface they are in, and the equation does not guarantee it is a plane, the area does not mean anything.

Basemap streamplot blank sphere

I want to make a streamplot in Basemap module, but I get a blank sphere. Please help me resolve this problem. I use matplotlib 1.3 and ordinary streamplot is working fine.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap
map = Basemap(projection='ortho',lat_0=45,lon_0=-100,resolution='l')
# draw lat/lon grid lines every 30 degrees.
map.drawmeridians(np.arange(0,360,30))
map.drawparallels(np.arange(-90,90,30))
# prepare grids
lons = np.linspace(0, 2*np.pi, 100)
lats = np.linspace(-np.pi/2, np.pi/2, 100)
lons, lats = np.meshgrid(lons, lats)
# parameters for vector field
beta = 0.0
alpha = 1.0
u = -np.cos(lats)*(beta - alpha*np.cos(2.0*lons))
v = alpha*(1.0 - np.cos(lats)**2)*np.sin(2.0*lons)
speed = np.sqrt(u*u + v*v)
# compute native map projection coordinates of lat/lon grid.
x, y = map(lons*180./np.pi, lats*180./np.pi)
# contour data over the map.
cs = map.streamplot(x, y, u, v, latlon = True, color = speed, cmap=plt.cm.autumn, linewidth=0.5)
plt.show()

I can't exactly tell you what's wrong, but from the matplotlib.streamplot manual:
matplotlib.pyplot.streamplot(x, y, u, v, density=1, linewidth=None,
color=None, cmap=None, norm=None, arrowsize=1, arrowstyle=u'-|>',
minlength=0.1, transform=None, zorder=1, hold=None)¶
Draws streamlines of a vector flow.
x, y : 1d arrays
an evenly spaced grid.
u, v : 2d arrays
x and y-velocities. Number of rows should match length of y, and the number of columns should match x.
Additionally from matplotlib.basemap.streamplot you can read that
If latlon keyword is set to True, x,y are intrepreted as longitude and latitude in degrees.
Which corresponds to the fact that x and y should be 1D arrays (lat, lon). However in your example x and y are
>>> np.shape(x)
(100, 100)
>>> np.shape(y)
(100, 100)
Then again you call the method map() "to compute native map projection coordinates of lat/lon grid" which is coincidentally the same as the name of your basemap.map. So it depends on which one do you want? Because both will return a value! (or better to say, both will return an error)
Aditionally check out the values you have in your u array. They are of range e-17. While other values are easily in the range e+30. IIRC the way you get streamlines is by solving a differential equation in which points you sent it as values are used as parameters at coordinates you sent. It's not hard to imagine a that while calculating something with these numbers a floating point round-off occurs and you suddenly start getting NaN or 0 values.
Try to scale your example better or if you want to pursue the solution to the end you can try and use np.seterr to get a more detailed idea where it fails.
Sorry I couldn't have been of a bigger help.

Extract coordinates enclosed by a matplotlib patch.

I have created an ellipse using matplotlib.patches.ellipse as shown below:
patch = mpatches.Ellipse(center, major_ax, minor_ax, angle_deg, fc='none', ls='solid', ec='g', lw='3.')
What I want is a list of all the integer coordinates enclosed inside this patch.
I.e. If I was to plot this ellipse along with every integer point on the same grid, how many of those points are enclosed in the ellipse?
I have tried seeing if I can extract the equation of the ellipse so I can loop through each point and see whether it falls within the line but I can't seem to find an obvious way to do this, it becomes more complicated as the major axis of the ellipse can be orientated at any angle. The information to do this must be stored in patches somewhere, but I can't seem to find it.
Any advice on this would be much appreciated.

Ellipse objects have a method contains_point which will return 1 if the point is in the ellipse, 0 other wise.
Stealing from #DrV 's answer:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.patches
import numpy as np
# create an ellipse
el = matplotlib.patches.Ellipse((50,-23), 10, 13.7, 30, facecolor=(1,0,0,.2), edgecolor='none')
# calculate the x and y points possibly within the ellipse
y_int = np.arange(-30, -15)
x_int = np.arange(40, 60)
# create a list of possible coordinates
g = np.meshgrid(x_int, y_int)
coords = list(zip(*(c.flat for c in g)))
# create the list of valid coordinates (from untransformed)
ellipsepoints = np.vstack([p for p in coords if el.contains_point(p, radius=0)])
# just to see if this works
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.add_artist(el)
ep = np.array(ellipsepoints)
ax.plot(ellipsepoints[:,0], ellipsepoints[:,1], 'ko')
plt.show()
This will give you the result as below:

If you really want to use the methods offered by matplotlib, then:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.patches
import numpy as np
# create an ellipse
el = matplotlib.patches.Ellipse((50,-23), 10, 13.7, 30, facecolor=(1,0,0,.2), edgecolor='none')
# find the bounding box of the ellipse
bb = el.get_window_extent()
# calculate the x and y points possibly within the ellipse
x_int = np.arange(np.ceil(bb.x0), np.floor(bb.x1) + 1, dtype='int')
y_int = np.arange(np.ceil(bb.y0), np.floor(bb.y1) + 1, dtype='int')
# create a list of possible coordinates
g = np.meshgrid(x_int, y_int)
coords = np.array(zip(*(c.flat for c in g)))
# create a list of transformed points (transformed so that the ellipse is a unit circle)
transcoords = el.get_transform().inverted().transform(coords)
# find the transformed coordinates which are within a unit circle
validcoords = transcoords[:,0]**2 + transcoords[:,1]**2 < 1.0
# create the list of valid coordinates (from untransformed)
ellipsepoints = coords[validcoords]
# just to see if this works
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
ax.add_artist(el)
ep = np.array(ellipsepoints)
ax.plot(ellipsepoints[:,0], ellipsepoints[:,1], 'ko')
Seems to work:
(Zooming in reveals that even the points hanging on the edge are inside.)
The point here is that matplotlib handles ellipses as transformed circles (translate, rotate, scale, anything affine). If the transform is applied in reverse, the result is a unit circle at origin, and it is very simple to check if a point is within that.
Just a word of warning: The get_window_extent may not be extremely reliable, as it seems to use the spline approximation of a circle. Also, see tcaswell's comment on the renderer-dependency.
In order to find a more reliable bounding box, you may:
create a horizontal and vertical vector into the plot coordinates (their position is not important, ([0,0],[1,0]) and ([0,0], [0,1]) will do)
transform these vectors into the ellipse coordinates (the get_transform, etc.)
find in the ellipse coordinate system (i.e. the system where the ellipse is a unit circle around the origin) the four tangents of the circle which are parallel to these two vectors
find the intersection points of the vectors (4 intersections, but 2 diagonal will be enough)
transform the intersection points back to the plot coordinates
This will give an accurate (but of course limited by the numerical precision) square bounding box.
However, you may use a simple approximation:
all possible points are within a circle whose center is the same as that of the ellipse and whose diameter is the same as that of the major axis of the ellipse
In other words, all possible points are within a square bounding box which is between x0+-m/2, y0+-m/2, where (x0, y0) is the center of the ellipse and m the major axis.

I'd like to offer another solution that uses the Path object's contains_points() method instead of contains_point():
First get the coordinates of the ellipse and make it into a Path object:
elpath=Path(el.get_verts())
(NOTE that el.get_paths() won't work for some reason.)
Then call the path's contains_points():
validcoords=elpath.contains_points(coords)
Below I'm comparing #tacaswell's solution (method 1), #Drv's (method 2) and my own (method 3) (I've enlarged the ellipse by ~5 times):
import numpy
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.patches import Ellipse
from matplotlib.path import Path
import time
#----------------Create an ellipse----------------
el=Ellipse((50,-23),50,70,30,facecolor=(1,0,0,.2), edgecolor='none')
#---------------------Method 1---------------------
t1=time.time()
for ii in range(50):
y=numpy.arange(-100,50)
x=numpy.arange(-30,130)
g=numpy.meshgrid(x,y)
coords=numpy.array(zip(*(c.flat for c in g)))
ellipsepoints = numpy.vstack([p for p in coords if el.contains_point(p, radius=0)])
t2=time.time()
print 'time of method 1',t2-t1
#---------------------Method 2---------------------
t2=time.time()
for ii in range(50):
y=numpy.arange(-100,50)
x=numpy.arange(-30,130)
g=numpy.meshgrid(x,y)
coords=numpy.array(zip(*(c.flat for c in g)))
invtrans=el.get_transform().inverted()
transcoords=invtrans.transform(coords)
validcoords=transcoords[:,0]**2+transcoords[:,1]**2<=1.0
ellipsepoints=coords[validcoords]
t3=time.time()
print 'time of method 2',t3-t2
#---------------------Method 3---------------------
t3=time.time()
for ii in range(50):
y=numpy.arange(-100,50)
x=numpy.arange(-30,130)
g=numpy.meshgrid(x,y)
coords=numpy.array(zip(*(c.flat for c in g)))
#------Create a path from ellipse's vertices------
elpath=Path(el.get_verts())
# call contains_points()
validcoords=elpath.contains_points(coords)
ellipsepoints=coords[validcoords]
t4=time.time()
print 'time of method 3',t4-t3
#---------------------Plot it ---------------------
fig,ax=plt.subplots()
ax.add_artist(el)
ep=numpy.array(ellipsepoints)
ax.plot(ellipsepoints[:,0],ellipsepoints[:,1],'ko')
plt.show(block=False)
I got these execution time:
time of method 1 62.2502269745
time of method 2 0.488734006882
time of method 3 0.588987112045
So the contains_point() approach is way slower. The coordinate-transformation method is faster than mine, but when you get irregular shaped contours/polygons, this method would still work.
Finally the result plot:

Using Radial Basis Functions to Interpolate a Function on a Sphere

First, a bit of background:
I am using spherical harmonics as an example of a function on the surface of a sphere like the front spheres in this image:
I produced one of these spheres, coloured according to the value of the harmonic function at points on its surface. I do this first for a very large number of points, so my function is very accurate. I've called this my fine sphere.
Now that I have my fine sphere, I take a relatively small number of points on the sphere. These are the points I wish to interpolate from, the training data, and I call them interp points. Here are my interp points, coloured to their values, plotted on my fine sphere.
Now, the goal of the project is to use these interp points to train a SciPy Radial Basis Function to interpolate my function on the sphere. I was able to do this using:
# Train the interpolation using interp coordinates
rbf = Rbf(interp.phi, interp.theta, harmonic13_coarse)
# The result of the interpolation on fine coordinates
interp_values = rbf(fine.phi, fine.theta)
Which produced this interpolation, plotted on the sphere:
Hopefully, through this last image, you can see my problem. Notice the line running through the interpolation? This is because the interpolation data has a boundary. The boundary is because I trained the radial basis function using spherical coordinates (boundaries at [0,pi] and [0,2pi]).
rbf = Rbf(interp.phi, interp.theta, harmonic13_coarse)
My goal, and why I'm posting this problem, is to interpolate my function on the surface of the sphere using the x,y,z Cartesian coordinates of the data on the sphere. This way, since spheres don't have boundaries, I won't have this boundary error like I do in spherical coordinates. However, I just can't figure out how to do this.
I've tried simply giving the Rbf function the x,y,z coordinates and the value of the function.
rbf=Rbf(interp.x, interp.y, interp.z, harmonic13_coarse)
interp_values=rbf(fine.x,fine.y,fine.z)
But NumPy throws me a Singular Matrix Error
numpy.linalg.linalg.LinAlgError: singular matrix
Is there any way for me to give Rbf my data sites in Cartesian coordinates, with the function values at each site and have it behave like it does with spherical coordinates but without that boundaries? From the Rbf documentation, there is the attribute norm for defining a different distance norm, could I have to use a spherical distance to get this to work?
I'm pretty much stumped on this. Let me know if you have any ideas for interpolating my function on a sphere without the boundaries of spherical coordinates.
Here is my code in full:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import cm, colors
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import numpy as np
from scipy import special
from scipy.interpolate import Rbf
from collections import namedtuple
from mayavi import mlab
# Nice aliases
pi = np.pi
cos = np.cos
sin = np.sin
# Creating a sphere in Cartesian and Sphereical
# Saves coordinates as named tuples
def coordinates(r, n):
phi, theta = np.mgrid[0:pi:n, 0:2 * pi:n]
Coor = namedtuple('Coor', 'r phi theta x y z')
r = r
x = r * sin(phi) * cos(theta)
y = r * sin(phi) * sin(theta)
z = r * cos(phi)
return Coor(r, phi, theta, x, y, z)
# Creating a sphere
# fine is coordinates on a fine grid
# interp is coordinates on coarse grid for training interpolation
fine = coordinates(1, 100j)
interp = coordinates(1, 5j)
# Defining finection to colour sphere
# Here we are using a spherical harmonic
def harmonic(m, n, theta, phi):
return special.sph_harm(m, n, theta, phi).real
norm = colors.Normalize()
# One example of the harmonic function, for testing
harmonic13_fine = harmonic(1, 3, fine.theta, fine.phi)
harmonic13_coarse = harmonic(1, 3, interp.theta, interp.phi)
# Train the interpolation using interp coordinates
rbf = Rbf(interp.phi, interp.theta, harmonic13_coarse)
# The result of the interpolation on fine coordinates
interp_values = rbf(fine.phi, fine.theta)
rbf=Rbf(interp.x, interp.y, interp.z, harmonic13_coarse)
interp_values=rbf(fine.x,fine.y,fine.z)
#Figure of harmoinc function on sphere in fine cordinates
#Points3d showing interpolation training points coloured to their value
mlab.figure()
vmax, vmin = np.max(harmonic13_fine), np.min(harmonic13_fine)
mlab.mesh(fine.x, fine.y, fine.z, scalars=harmonic13_fine, vmax=vmax, vmin=vmin)
mlab.points3d(interp.x, interp.y, interp.z, harmonic13_coarse,
scale_factor=0.1, scale_mode='none', vmax=vmax, vmin=vmin)
#Figure showing results of rbf interpolation
mlab.figure()
vmax, vmin = np.max(harmonic13_fine), np.min(harmonic13_fine)
mlab.mesh(fine.x, fine.y, fine.z, scalars=interp_values)
# mlab.points3d(interp.x, interp.y, interp.z, scalars, scale_factor=0.1, scale_mode='none',vmax=vmax, vmin=vmin)
mlab.show()

The boundary you see is because you are mapping a closed surface (S2) to an open one (R2). One way or another, you will have boundaries. The local properties of the manifolds are compatible, so it works for most of the sphere, but not the global, you get a line.
The way around it is to use an atlas instead of a single chart. An atlas is a collection of overlapping charts. In the overlapping region, you need to define weights, a smooth function that goes from 0 to 1 on each chart. (Sorry, probably differential geometry was not what you were expecting to hear).
If you don't want to go all the way here, you can notice that your original sphere has an equator where the variance is minimal. You can then rotate your fine sphere and make it coincide with the line. It doesn't solve your problem, but it can certainly mitigate it.

You can change the standard distance:
def euclidean_norm(x1, x2):
return np.sqrt( ((x1 - x2)**2).sum(axis=0) )
by the sphere distance (see, for instance, this question Haversine Formula in Python (Bearing and Distance between two GPS points)).