plotly

3D MODELING IN PYTHON

Description

Plotly is a graphing library that allows users to build charts and data visualizations fairly easily using python's pandas library, R, Julia, Javascript, ggplot2, Matlab, and F#. Moreover, it allows for builders to make a website for their chart(s) using another library plotly works in tandem with, dash.

Official Resources

Documentation

Setup (for Python usage)

Install Python(learn how to do so here)

Then, install ploltly using pip

pip install plotly

Basic Usage

After setting up plotly. You should have a dataframe set up. This can be done in a few ways

• Having a file read

  • Likely the most common way to do this, there are a million and one python libraries that will do this for you, including pandas itself for common data files such as JSONs and CSVs.

• Making a dataframe yourself out of a dictionary

  • A dictionary is python's way of making what programmers traditionally call a Hash Map. Essentially, it assigns some variable of your choosing to another variable of your choosing. 

    • You can build your data in this way if you have code to randomly assign values, or if your data is created through computation.

Then, you can use your pandas dataframe to chart the data you want through one of the many types of charts available on plotly. One thing to note is that every "object" you make must be added to a central figure that will eventually be shown on screen. 

Below is an example of what you can do with plotly for showing a 3D mesh with clear rectangles to signify different important regions on the chart: