how to set "camera position" for 3d plots using python/matplotlib?

Question

I'm learning how to use mplot3d to produce nice plots of 3d data and I'm pretty happy so far. What I am trying to do at the moment is a little animation of a rotating surface. For that purpose, I need to set a camera position for the 3D projection. I guess this must be possible since a surface can be rotated using the mouse when using matplotlib interactively. But how can I do this from a script? I found a lot of transforms in mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.proj3d but I could not find out how to use these for my purpose and I didn't find any example for what I'm trying to do.

Answer 1

By "camera position," it sounds like you want to adjust the elevation and the azimuth angle that you use to view the 3D plot. You can set this with ax.view_init. I've used the below script to first create the plot, then I determined a good elevation, or elev, from which to view my plot. I then adjusted the azimuth angle, or azim, to vary the full 360deg around my plot, saving the figure at each instance (and noting which azimuth angle as I saved the plot). For a more complicated camera pan, you can adjust both the elevation and angle to achieve the desired effect.

    from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D     ax = Axes3D(fig)     ax.scatter(xx,yy,zz, marker='o', s=20, c="goldenrod", alpha=0.6)     for ii in xrange(0,360,1):         ax.view_init(elev=10., azim=ii)         savefig("movie%d.png" % ii) 

Answer 2

What would be handy would be to apply the Camera position to a new plot. So I plot, then move the plot around with the mouse changing the distance. Then try to replicate the view including the distance on another plot. I find that axx.ax.get_axes() gets me an object with the old .azim and .elev.

IN PYTHON...

axx=ax1.get_axes() azm=axx.azim ele=axx.elev dst=axx.dist       # ALWAYS GIVES 10 #dst=ax1.axes.dist # ALWAYS GIVES 10 #dst=ax1.dist      # ALWAYS GIVES 10 

Later 3d graph...

ax2.view_init(elev=ele, azim=azm) #Works! ax2.dist=dst                       # works but always 10 from axx 

EDIT 1... OK, Camera position is the wrong way of thinking concerning the .dist value. It rides on top of everything as a kind of hackey scalar multiplier for the whole graph.

This works for the magnification/zoom of the view:

xlm=ax1.get_xlim3d() #These are two tupples ylm=ax1.get_ylim3d() #we use them in the next zlm=ax1.get_zlim3d() #graph to reproduce the magnification from mousing axx=ax1.get_axes() azm=axx.azim ele=axx.elev 

Later Graph...

ax2.view_init(elev=ele, azim=azm) #Reproduce view ax2.set_xlim3d(xlm[0],xlm[1])     #Reproduce magnification ax2.set_ylim3d(ylm[0],ylm[1])     #... ax2.set_zlim3d(zlm[0],zlm[1])     #...