3D scatter plot -- controlling colors of individual points

[Ljewin]

Hi folks,

I need to control the individual color of points in a 3D scatter plot. The post 

ActiveX 3D Graph Shows Wrong Colors of Points on LabVIEW - NI

seems to give the direction. However, I fail to fill the 3D indicator with n 1-point plots rather than one plot with n points. See the attached vi. What am I doing wrongly?

Best regards,
Peter

[JGoebel]

Hi Peter,
Your example differs from the example from the article.

On the for loop output tunnle, rightclick -> tunnlemode -> concatenating
This will create an array of plot-objects, rather than a single one.
These will now all have the same color. By using the propertynode for "active plot", followed by the propertynodes for the style and color palette, you can set the color palette to a single specific color for each plot. You have to make sure to set the plot ID for the plot helper and the property node.

I've attached an example that colors the dots with 10 different colors defined in a separate array.
Best, Jan

[alexderjuengere]

I'd say you better use a shift register instead of auto-concatenating

why?

your sample data has N= 10, so there shall be 10 plots.

if you use auto-concatenating this results in  sizes = 55

if you use a shift register instead of auto-concatenating this results in  sizes = 10, as expected, therefore I prefer the shift register method

however, for both methods, the resulting plots look almost identical, and for a dataset with N=10 this is irrelevant.

attached as labview 2025 q3, as I can't back-convert, because of:

[JGoebel]

Hi Alexander,
thanks a lot for your comment. You are in deed right. The Plot helper generates an array of the size of the Plot-ID you enter. That way a faculty(i) (i!) sized array is created with a lot of empty plots.

This causes the performance issues that were also mentioned in the article.
I've created a new article and example for this that runs much faster and replaced the old KnowledgeBase with it:

https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA0VU0000009mjl0AA&l=en-GB

 

Best,
Jan

[Ljewin]

Thanks a lot to both, Jan and Alexander, for the given solution!

[BertMcMahan]

Jan, hate to be "that guy" but since you JUST posted it, thought I'd point out a typo- the first line says "The points in a single plor are..."

Think that should be "plot" 🙂