Removing axes margins in 3D plot

Question

I spent last few days trying to find a way to remove tiny margins from axes in a 3D plot. I tried ax.margins(0) and ax.autoscale_view(\'tight\') an

Answer 1

There is not property or method that can modify this margins. You need to patch the source code. Here is an example:

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
###patch start###
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.axis3d import Axis
if not hasattr(Axis, "_get_coord_info_old"):
    def _get_coord_info_new(self, renderer):
        mins, maxs, centers, deltas, tc, highs = self._get_coord_info_old(renderer)
        mins += deltas / 4
        maxs -= deltas / 4
        return mins, maxs, centers, deltas, tc, highs
    Axis._get_coord_info_old = Axis._get_coord_info  
    Axis._get_coord_info = _get_coord_info_new
###patch end###

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
for c, z in zip(['r', 'g', 'b', 'y'], [30, 20, 10, 0]):
    xs = np.arange(20)
    ys = np.random.rand(20)

    # You can provide either a single color or an array. To demonstrate this,
    # the first bar of each set will be colored cyan.
    cs = [c] * len(xs)
    cs[0] = 'c'
    ax.bar(xs, ys, zs=z, zdir='y', color=cs, alpha=0.8)

ax.set_xlabel('X')
ax.set_ylabel('Y')
ax.set_zlabel('Z')

plt.show()

The result is:

Edit

To change the color of the grid lines:

for axis in (ax.xaxis, ax.yaxis, ax.zaxis):
    axis._axinfo['grid']['color']  = 0.7, 1.0, 0.7, 1.0

Edit2

Set X & Y lim:

ax.set_ylim3d(-1, 31)
ax.set_xlim3d(-1, 21)

Answer 2

I had to tweak the accepted solution slightly, because in my case the x and y axes (but not the z) had an additional margin, which, by printing mins, maxs, deltas, turned out to be deltas * 6.0/11. Here is the updated patch that worked well in my case.

###patch start###
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.axis3d import Axis
def _get_coord_info_new(self, renderer):
    mins, maxs, cs, deltas, tc, highs = self._get_coord_info_old(renderer)
    correction = deltas * [1.0/4 + 6.0/11,
                           1.0/4 + 6.0/11,
                           1.0/4]
    mins += correction
    maxs -= correction
    return mins, maxs, cs, deltas, tc, highs
if not hasattr(Axis, "_get_coord_info_old"):
    Axis._get_coord_info_old = Axis._get_coord_info  
Axis._get_coord_info = _get_coord_info_new
###patch end###

(I've also changed the patching logic around a bit, so that editing the function and reloading its module now works as expected in Jupyter.)