Changing grid line thickness in 3D surface plot in Python Matplotlib

Question

I'm trying to change the thickness and transparency of the lines that make up the grid in the background of a surface plot like this example from Matplotlib's website:

Here's the source code:

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import cm
from matplotlib.ticker import LinearLocator, FormatStrFormatter
import numpy as np

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.gca(projection='3d')

# Make data.
X = np.arange(-5, 5, 0.25)
Y = np.arange(-5, 5, 0.25)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(X, Y)
R = np.sqrt(X**2 + Y**2)
Z = np.sin(R)

# Plot the surface.
surf = ax.plot_surface(X, Y, Z, cmap=cm.coolwarm,
                   linewidth=0, antialiased=False)

# Customize the z axis.
ax.set_zlim(-1.01, 1.01)
ax.zaxis.set_major_locator(LinearLocator(10))
ax.zaxis.set_major_formatter(FormatStrFormatter('%.02f'))

# Add a color bar which maps values to colors.
fig.colorbar(surf, shrink=0.5, aspect=5)

plt.show()

I've tried calling ax.grid(linewidth=x) but that doesn't seem to make a difference. Is there some other way to change the thickness?

Answer 1

A way to set the grid parameters in mplot3d is to update the _axinfo dictionary of the respective axis.

To set the linewidth of the grid in y direction, use e.g.

ax.yaxis._axinfo["grid"]['linewidth'] = 3.

Here is a general example:

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.gca(projection='3d')
ax.set_xlabel("x"); ax.set_ylabel("y"); ax.set_zlabel("z")
print ax.xaxis._axinfo

ax.xaxis._axinfo["grid"].update({"linewidth":1, "color" : "green"})

ax.yaxis._axinfo["grid"]['linewidth'] = 3.

ax.zaxis._axinfo["grid"]['color'] = "#ee0009"
ax.zaxis._axinfo["grid"]['linestyle'] = ":"


plt.show()