How can we plot solids of revolution in python 3 (with matplotlib)?

Question

I was a Scilab user, but I am changing to python (because I need Symbolic analys also), now I am new Python user, how to plot a solid of revolution?

Answer 1

Matplotlib plots 3D meshes. With that you can plot a solid of revolution. You have several examples here. One such example is this:

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

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.gca(projection='3d')
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)
surf = ax.plot_surface(X, Y, Z, rstride=1, cstride=1, cmap=cm.coolwarm,
                       linewidth=0, antialiased=False)
ax.set_zlim(-1.01, 1.01)

ax.zaxis.set_major_locator(LinearLocator(10))
ax.zaxis.set_major_formatter(FormatStrFormatter('%.02f'))

fig.colorbar(surf, shrink=0.5, aspect=5)

plt.show()

If you want something more direct you might want to try using pycsg, pythonOCC framework or sympy.

The last resource is a bit outside Python. You can use Sage (uses Python syntax) to do Solids of Revolution.