I'm learning how to use mplot3d to produce nice plots of 3d data and I'm pretty happy so far. What I am trying to do at the moment is a little animation of a rotating surface. For that purpose, I need to set a camera position for the 3D projection. I guess this must be possible since a surface can be rotated using the mouse when using matplotlib interactively. But how can I do this from a script? I found a lot of transforms in mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.proj3d but I could not find out how to use these for my purpose and I didn't find any example for what I'm trying to do.
By "camera position," it sounds like you want to adjust the elevation and the azimuth angle that you use to view the 3D plot. You can set this with ax.view_init. I've used the below script to first create the plot, then I determined a good elevation, or elev, from which to view my plot. I then adjusted the azimuth angle, or azim, to vary the full 360deg around my plot, saving the figure at each instance (and noting which azimuth angle as I saved the plot). For a more complicated camera pan, you can adjust both the elevation and angle to achieve the desired effect.
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
ax = Axes3D(fig)
ax.scatter(xx,yy,zz, marker='o', s=20, c="goldenrod", alpha=0.6)
for ii in xrange(0,360,1):
ax.view_init(elev=10., azim=ii)
savefig("movie%d.png" % ii)