6.3 Making 3D plots

There are some useful matplotlib toolkits and modules that can be used for a variety of special purposes. In this section, we describe a method for producing 3D plots.

The toolkit mplot3d provides the 3D plotting of points, lines, contours, surfaces, and all other basic components, as well as 3D rotation and scaling. A 3D plot is generated by adding the keyword projection='3d' to the axes object, as shown in the following example:

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import axes3d

fig = figure()
ax = fig.gca(projection='3d')
# plot points in 3D
class1 = 0.6 * random.standard_normal((200,3))
ax.plot(class1[:,0],class1[:,1],class1[:,2],'o')
class2 = 1.2 * random.standard_normal((200,3)) + array([5,4,0])
ax.plot(class2[:,0],class2[:,1],class2[:,2],'o')
class3 = 0.3 * random.standard_normal((200,3)) + array([0,3,2])
ax.plot(class3[:,0],class3[:,1],class3[:,2],'o')

As you can see,...