Three-dimensional plots

Two-dimensional plots are the bread and butter of data visualization. However, if you want to show off, nothing beats a good three-dimensional plot. I was once in charge of a software package that could draw contour plots and three-dimensional plots. The software could even draw plots that, when viewed with special glasses, would pop right in front of you.

The matplotlib API has the Axes3D class for three-dimensional plots. By demonstrating how this class works, we will also show how the object-oriented matplotlib API works. The matplotlib Figure class is a top-level container for chart elements:

1. Create a figure object as follows:

           fig = plt.figure() 
   

2. Create an Axes3D object from the figure object:

           ax = Axes3D(fig) 
   

3. The years and CPU transistor counts will be our X and Y axes. It is necessary for us to create coordinate matrices from the years and CPU transistor counts arrays. Create the coordinate matrices with the NumPy meshgrid() function:

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