draping texture over a 3D surface in python

Question

my goal is to drap a texture (i.e. an image) over a surface and visualize it in 3D with python. The application is viewing an orthophotography over a DEM, I thence use gdal for importing my data (both image and DEM). I tried to use plot_surface from matplotlib but it seems that I can't add texture to the surface.

here is the current code:

from osgeo import gdal
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.gridspec import GridSpec
import numpy as np

ds = gdal.Open('MyDEM.cub')
dem = ds.ReadAsArray()

do = gdal.Open('MyOrtho.cub')
or = do.ReadAsArray()

xres = gt[1]
yres = gt[5]

X = np.arange(gt[0], gt[0] + dem.shape[1]*xres, xres)
Y = np.linspace(gt[3], gt[3] + dem.shape[0]*yres, ds.RasterYSize)

X, Y = np.meshgrid(X, Y)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(16,8), subplot_kw={'projection': '3d'})

surf = ax.plot_surface(X,Y,dem,rstride=1, cstride=1,linewidth=0, antialiased=True,cmap=plt.cm.RdYlBu_r)


fig.colorbar(surf, shrink=0.4, aspect=20)

plt.show()

How can I use or array as a texture (e.g., or can have a different resolution/size than dem but I'll manage this later), I want first to have a stupid 3D surface with a texture. This is easy in Matlab, but how to do it with Python? Any idea ?

Answer 1

Yeah Mayavi will do this. You can open the DEM file in gdal and then pull the image into TVTK as a texture. Finally you can wrap it over the surface with the mlab.surf() commands. Here is a link to a good example of this.

Example

Answer 2

From the matplotlib docs:

Axes3D.plot_surface(X, Y, Z, *args, **kwargs)

Create a surface plot.

By default it will be colored in shades of a solid color, but it also supports color mapping by supplying the cmap argument.

It seems, therefore, that matplotlib does not support the use of an arbitrary image on a surface plot. You will need to identify another library that provides this feature (a quick search suggests that mayavi may do what you want).