Matplotlib 3D WireFrame Plot - plot_wireframe() Function

In this tutorial, we will cover the 3D Wireframe plot in the matplotlib library. We have already covered the 3D plot basics in Matplotlib library, along with 3D Line Plot, Scatter plot and 3D contour plot.

For the data visualization using 3D wireframe, we require some modules from matplotlib, mpl_toolkits and numpy library.

The wireframe plot basically takes a grid of values and projects it onto the specified 3-dimensional surfaces, and it can help in making the resulting three-dimensional forms quite easy for visualization.

To create the 3D Wireframe plot the plot_wireframe() function will be used.

Now its time to cover few examples for the 3D wireframe plot.

3D Wireframe Plot Basic Example:

Below we have an example where we will create a 3D Wireframe plot:

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import axes3d 
from matplotlib import pyplot 

fig = pyplot.figure() 
wf = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d') 
x, y, z = axes3d.get_test_data(0.07) 
wf.plot_wireframe(x,y,z, rstride=2, cstride=2, color='maroon') 

wf.set_title('3D wireframe plot') 
pyplot.show() 

Here is the output of the above code:

3D Wireframe Plot Example 2:

Here is another example and code snippet for the same is given below:

from mpl_toolkits import mplot3d 
import numpy 

a = numpy.linspace(-5, 5, 25) 
b = numpy.linspace(-5, 5, 25) 
x, y = numpy.meshgrid(a, b) 
z = numpy.cos(numpy.sqrt(x**2 + y**2)) 

fig = pyplot.figure() 
wf = pyplot.axes(projection ='3d') 
wf.plot_wireframe(x, y, z, color ='blue') 

wf.set_title('Example 2') 
pyplot.show() 

Here is the output of the above code: