Plotting in three dimensions

pgfplots has impressive 3D plotting capabilities. There are so many customization options that we will leave most of the details to the manual and just go through a few examples here.

We will use the \addplot3 command similarly to \addplot; now, we have functions such as z = f(x,y) or parametrization in x, y, and z.

pgfplots easily provides 3D axes, drawn as a box with ticks at the edges by default. One interesting feature is color maps: we can improve our 3D visualizations by mapping the z value to a color. To get started, let’s load the corresponding library first:

\usepgfplotslibrary{colormaps}

We continue to use the radian format:

\pgfplotsset{trig format plots=rad}

We will use a black-and-white color map, where the lowest z values are black, and the higher the z value, the lighter the color. The highest z value will be printed in white.

A typical visualization is a surface plot that draws a mesh representing the function...