Surface and Plane

All,

Here is my first attempt to draw a surface and a plane on the same axes using mplot3d.

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
from matplotlib import cm
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

fig=plt.figure()
ax = Axes3D(fig)

x=np.linspace(-2,2,40)
y=x
x, y = np.meshgrid(x,y)
z=9-x**2-y**2

ax.plot_surface(x,y,z,rstride=5,cstride=5)

xp=np.linspace(-2,2,40)
zp=np.linspace(0,9,40)
xp, zp=np.meshgrid(xp,zp)
yp=np.ones(xp.shape)

ax.plot_surface(xp,yp,zp)

plt.show()

The difficulty comes when I rotate the axes with the mouse. You cannot tell where the correct position of the plane is as you can when rotating a similar figure in Matlab. Is this a bug or a feature yet to be added? Is there a workaround I am not aware of at this early stage?

David Arnold
College of the Redwoods
Department of Mathematics