An application of volumes of revolution for plotting a three-dimensional heart. If your TeX installation would throw an error “TeX capacity exceeded”, you could use LuaLaTeX instead of pdfLaTeX, since it automatically allocates more memory.
This code was written by cmhughes on TeX.SE.
\documentclass[border=10pt]{standalone} \usepackage{pgfplots} \pgfplotsset{width=7cm,compat=1.10} \pgfplotsset{ /pgfplots/colormap={pink}{% color(0cm) = (purple); color(1cm) = (pink!80!purple); color(2cm) = (pink!90); color(3cm) = (pink) } } \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[ view={0}{10}, axis equal, axis lines=none, colormap name =pink, ] \addplot3[ surf, shader=faceted, samples=50, domain=0:2*pi,y domain=0:2*pi, z buffer=sort, opacity=0.15 ] ( {(sin(deg(x)))^3*cos(deg(y))}, {(sin(deg(x)))^3*sin(deg(y))}, {(13*cos(deg(x))-5*cos(2*deg(x))-2*cos(3*deg(x))-cos(4*deg(x)))/16} ); \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture} \end{document}