South Park Characters in ggplot2

R Humor

A few days ago, I saw a post on r-bloggers that re-creates the Simpsons lego character images with ggplot2.

This was just so mind-blowingly awesome to me that I had to adapt The Clerk’s code for the South Park lego characters. Here’s my final code:

Because ggplot2 works with data frames, the first step is to create a data frame containing the character bars. Lines 4–19 create the d2 data frame that has a row for each rectangular section of the bar chart.

> d2
   member         shade height wideness
1    Eric     EricPants      5      1.0
2    Eric     EricShirt     20      1.0
3    Eric          Skin     25      1.0
4    Eric       EricHat      5      1.0
5    Eric    EricPomPom      5      1.0
6    Kyle     KylePants      5      0.5
7    Kyle     KyleShirt     20      0.5
8    Kyle          Skin     25      0.5
9    Kyle KyleHatBottom      5      0.5
10   Kyle    KyleHatTop      5      0.5
11   Stan     StanPants      5      0.5
12   Stan     StanShirt     20      0.5
13   Stan          Skin     25      0.5
14   Stan    StanBottom      5      0.5
15   Stan    StanHatTop      5      0.5
16  Kenny   KennyOutfit     30      0.5
17  Kenny     KennyBand      5      0.5
18  Kenny          Skin      5      0.5
19  Kenny     KennyBand      5      0.5
20  Kenny   KennyOutfit     15      0.5

The main coding adjustment needed for this adaptation is to make Cartman’s bar wider. Having a variable width can be done in ggplot2 by adding a width argument to the ggplot call.

g2 <- ggplot(d2,aes(x=member,y=height,width=wideness,fill=shade))...

Other than that, just the names, heights and colors needed to be changed.

Two additional improvements that would be nice:

• Cartman’s pompom should have a smaller width than the rest of Cartman.
• The spacing between characters should be equal. As I have it now, Kyle is standing a little too close to Cartman.

But alas, I did not include these. Because <insert Cartman quote>.