What are the advantages of using a contour plot vs a 3d plot? Why use one over the other?
3D plots may be easier to visualize - though to be useful they need to be rotatable in real time.
Contour plots show all of the data in one view, but the resolution is limited by how many contour lines are drawn.
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In addition: if you have a quite complex surface where some of the surface is hidden or covered from some other 3D shape of this very surface, the contour plot is useful to encode this surface in a discrete way, see also this example here:
Source
Side note: it is also possible to combine both worlds 3D plot AND contour plot, see e.g. this matlab function surfc():
Hope that helps!
Best regards
Christian
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