Matplotlib Slow 3D Scatter Rotation

I am using matplotlib to scatter plot a 3D matrix of points. I am using the following code: import pylab as plt from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D import numpy as np my_data

Solution 1:

(revised 2021)

Matplotlib was not really designed to be interactive. Plotly (among a few others) is a plotting package that is rather feature complete and uses a webGL backend for scatter3D that will render in your browser (and is blazing fast). More on why you might want to consider it as a go-to replacement at the bottom:

# pip install plotly
import numpy as np
import plotly.graph_objects as go

my_data = np.random.rand(6500,3)  # toy 3D points
marker_data = go.Scatter3d(
    x=my_data[:,0], 
    y=my_data[:,1], 
    z=my_data[:,2], 
    marker=go.scatter3d.Marker(size=3), 
    opacity=0.8, 
    mode='markers'
)
fig=go.Figure(data=marker_data)
fig.show()

I use plotly as a replacement for matplotlib because:

• it has great coverage (bar, scatter, line, hist, etc.)
• intuitive interactive components that are highly configurable
• portability: it can generate html plots which are easily viewed across a network(!) or saved as static file formats
• it has a clearer api than matplotlib (for full config, jsonish)
• it integrates strongly with pandas (you can use it as the backend)
• it is well supported and adoption is increasing