This example is mostly for fun – a periodic series of damped sine waves. Viewed from or near top-down, I think it's a pretty cool effect. Click on 'animate' below the plot to start it going. The calculations are a little heavy, but my Galaxy S3 copes with them moderately well.

Mouse controls: Left-click and drag to rotate; alt (Mac)- or ctrl (Windows)-click-drag or middle-click-drag to pan; scroll or shift-click-drag to zoom. Touch screen controls: one finger to rotate; two-finger scroll to pan; pinch to zoom. Click/tap on the cube icons to snap to a side-on view.

Animate.

You can see how the plot is constructed in the HTML source:

• The general setup is similar to the sinc function example.
• To animate, a function (here animate_waves()) calculates the new z-values for each grid node, calls three_d.change_data(), and then calls requestAnimationFrame(animate_waves) to loop.
• The colours are set from the initial surface/mesh creation and don't update. I'm glad they don't update (the colour re-calculations would be expensive), but the reason for the lack of updating is opaque. It's because I'm using a global params variable (not best practice!), and during the initial creation of the surface, it has .data.color values attached to it. Ordinarily, the whole object would disappear at the end of the initialisation function. But in this case, params and its colours remain, and on subsequent calls to three_d.change_data(), the automatic checking sees that colours are already set and don't need changing.

Posted 2016-12-22.