Locking Turntable Rotation to Y-Axis in 3D Plots

📊 Plotly Python
1

Hello everyone,

I’m working with 3D Scatter plots where it’s crucial to lock the turntable rotation to the Y-axis. The idea is to keep the Y-axis fixed while allowing rotation around it. While I understand that Plotly’s default behavior is to rotate around the Z-axis, this doesn’t meet my specific needs.

I’m aware of a trick where you can swap the Y and Z axes while adding traces, thereby giving the impression of Y-axis rotation. However, this approach isn’t suitable for my use case. My application deals with points that have meaningful X, Y, Z coordinates, and it’s important for the users to know these values as they are.

Does anyone know a workaround for this issue? Or could this feature possibly be added in a future release?

Thank you for your time and help.

2

HI @jmahmud,

Are you referring to rotation around y-axis? Imagine if you first enable orbital rotation, the user rotates the figure, enables turntable rotation?

Is the expectation that the Scatter3D rotates around the changed y-axis?

Are you open to use dash? There might be ways to emulate something like this.

3

Hi @AIMPED, thank you for your reply!

Indeed, I am referring to rotation around the Y-axis when using the turntable rotation. I am working on visualizing some cuboids, 3D lines, and point clouds, where the Y-axis is designated as ‘up.’ Due to this orientation, turntable rotation around the default Z-axis is unintuitive for users who expect ‘up’ to remain constant.

Unfortunately, using Dash apps is not an option for me; I need to create standalone HTML files for these visualizations.

Any insights or workarounds would be greatly appreciated!

4

Could you provide some sample data and code explaining why this does not work for you? I can’t check right now, but it should be possible to tweak axis labels and hoverinfo to give the user the “correct” impression.

1 Like
5

Awesome hint and this solves my problem! I did not realize we can easily update hovertemplate for almost any 3D entity.

In case someone stumbles upon this, what I needed to do to enable this:

  1. Swap Y and Z values whenever I use Scatter3D/Cone/Mesh3D
  2. For each of the above, set up a hover template like "x=%{x:.3f}, y=%{z:.3f}, z=%{y:.3f}<br>"
  3. Update the layout up direction and rename Y and Z axis:
    fig.update_layout( scene_camera={"up": {"x": 0.0, "y": 1.0, "z": 0.0}}, scene={ "dragmode": "turntable", "yaxis": {"title": "Z"}, "zaxis": {"title": "Y"}, }, )

With all these changes the code works exactly as intended.

1 Like