Create 3D Plots and Animation in R using RGL Package

The RGL package in R provides an interface to the OpenGL graphics library for creating interactive 3D plots and animations. It is built on top of OpenGL, the popular 3D graphics library that is widely used in computer graphics and game development. Using this package, we can provide animations to the 3D graphs. We can use Rgl Package to rotate the graph on its different axis.

The first step is to install the RGL package in R, which can be done by writing the following code:

install.packages("rgl")

Steps to Create 3D Animated Plots

Let us see step by step, how we can create a 3D plot in R and also provide animation to it using the RGL package.

Step 1: Install and load the Rgl package

First, we will install and then load the RGL package in our R script.

install.packages("rgl")
library(rgl)

Step 2: Create a data frame 

Create the dataframe that contains the variables to be plotted on a 3D graph. We can also use R’s inbuilt datagrams such as iris, mtcars, etc

data <- data.frame(x = c(1, 2, 3), y = c(4, 5, 6), z = c(7, 8, 9))

Step 3: Create a 3D scatter plot

After loading the dataframe, we will plot the graph using the plot3d() function and pass the attributes that we want to plot on the graph as parameters.

plot3d(data$x, data$y, data$z)

Step 4: Add labels to the axes

To make the graph more readable and understandable, we can label the axis using the axes3d() function, which takes a list of labels as the parameters.

axes3d(labels = c("X-axis", "Y-axis", "Z-axis"))

Step 5: Customize the graph

We can also customize the graph with various options such as colors, point sizes, and shapes to make it more representative.

plot3d(data$x, data$y, data$z, col = "red", size = 3, type = "s")

Step 6: Create animations

The final step would be to add animations to our graph using the play3d() function, which takes the spin3d() to specify on which axis the graph should rotate and the duration of the animation as the parameters. The default value of spin3d axis is c(0, 0, 1) which will spin the plot on z axis.

play3d(spin3d(axis = c(0, 0, 1), rpm = 10), duration = 10)

The R programming language provides a powerful set of tools and packages for creating interactive 3D plots and animations. One such package is RGL. In this article, let us learn How to create 3D plots and animations using the RGL package.