Changing the background color of the axes planes of a matplotlib 3D plot

Question

On the basis of the scatterplot example of matplotlib, how can I change the gray background color of the 3 axes grid planes? I would like to set it to white, keeping the gri

Answer 1

Using the same example. You can set the pane color using the set_pane_color method as described here http://matplotlib.org/mpl_toolkits/mplot3d/api.html#axis3d. You can set the color using the RGBA tuple:

# scatter3d_demo.py
# ...
# Set the background color of the pane YZ
ax.w_xaxis.set_pane_color((1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0))
plt.show()

Answer 2

For a slightly different approach, see below:

# Get rid of colored axes planes
# First remove fill
ax.xaxis.pane.fill = False
ax.yaxis.pane.fill = False
ax.zaxis.pane.fill = False

# Now set color to white (or whatever is "invisible")
ax.xaxis.pane.set_edgecolor('w')
ax.yaxis.pane.set_edgecolor('w')
ax.zaxis.pane.set_edgecolor('w')

# Bonus: To get rid of the grid as well:
ax.grid(False)

See this blog post that I used as my source.