Table Contour
Add a Table Contour () plot to display data from a table as a contour plot. Right-click a 2D Plot Group to add this plot type. First define a table to plot. This plot is also available from the plot groups’ contextual ribbon toolbar by selecting Table Contour from the More Surface Plots menu. Add Height Expression, Material Appearance, and Transparency and Visual Effects (only if Height Expression is used) subnodes if required.
Go to Common Results Node Settings for links to information about these sections: Title, Levels, Quality, Inherit Style, and, except for some details below, Coloring and Style.
Data
From the Source list, choose Table or Evaluation group, and then choose a table or evaluation group table with the data that you want to plot as a contour plot from the Table or Evaluation group list below.
From the Data format list, select one of the following formats for interpreting the table data:
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Select Filled table if the data is structurally filled (for tables only; this option is not available for evaluation groups). See Filled Table for additional settings for this data format.
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Select Columns (the default) if you want to specify what columns to take the data from. See Columns for additional settings for this format.
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Select Cells to treat the tables data as cells in a matrix and use the table row and column numbers as the x- and y-coordinates, respectively. There are no additional settings for this format.
Filled Table
Select an option from the Plot data list: From table (the default) or Manual. If Manual is selected, select options from the x-axis data and y-axis data lists, which contain the parameters that define the rows and columns for the table’s matrix data, and from the Data list, which corresponds to the Data list in the Table node for the data. If there are additional parameters in a parametric sweep, they need to be kept at fixed values, which you select from the Parameter value list, which contains all combinations of parameter values for the parameters that are not used as x-axis or y-axis data.
Columns
From the x-axis column, y-axis column, and Data column lists, choose the columns to use for the x-axis, y-axis, and the data, respectively.
For all data formats, select the Plot imaginary part check box if you want to plot the imaginary part of complex-valued data. For real-valued data, that plot shows a zero imaginary part.
Preprocessing
This section contains settings to preprocess the data in the table contour plot by scaling and shifting the data values, which can be useful to match data from different sources or to scale some data to express the values in another unit, for example.
Under x-axis column and y-axis column, from the Preprocessing list select:
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None (the default), for no preprocessing of the data.
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Linear, to preprocess the data using a linear transformation of the data values for the x- or y-axis column. You define the linear preprocessing with values for the scaling (default: 1) and the shift or offset (default: 0) in the Scaling and Shift fields, respectively. The default values do not change the original data values.
Coloring and Style
Select a Contour type: Line (the default) or Filled. Using filled contours creates a plot with color banding rather than isolated contour lines or tubes when using the other contour types.
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If Line is selected, you can also select the Level labels check box to display line labels on the graph.
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If Filled is selected, you can also clear the Fill surfaces outside of contour levels check box (selected by default) to not fill the areas of the geometry’s surface that are above the highest and below the lowest contour.
If you select to display level labels (not available for filled contours), select the Level labels check box and specify the precision (number of significant digits) as a positive integer in the Precision field (default: 4). You can also choose a color for the labels from the Label color list: Choose From theme to use the color from the color theme, choose Custom to define a custom color, or choose any of the predefined colors.
For coloring the contours, select one of the following options from the Coloring list:
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Select Color table (the default) to color the contours using a color table that you choose from the Color table list below.
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Select Uniform to use a predefined uniform color, or select Custom to define a custom color from the colored list below (on Windows) or by clicking the Color button (on Linux and macOS) and then selecting a color from the color palette.
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Select Gradient to specify the coloring as a gradient between two colors, which you specify using the Top color and Bottom color lists.
Choose a color table for the isosurfaces from the Color table list.
The Color legend check box is selected by default. Clear it to remove the color legend. Select the Reverse color table or Reverse color gradient check boxes as required.
From the Scale list, choose Linear (the default), Linear symmetric, or Logarithmic to scale the color legend.
For information about the Legend type list, see Legend Type.