Editing Python plot surface ticks and their frequency

Question

Gist of my question:

I have data that I am plot_surface-ing with python. How should I change the values of my xticks and yticks and perhaps their frequency?

Details of my question

I have data such as this. I had to upload my data file to dropbox as it is too large to reproduce here and I am not sure that a "minimal example" would do justice.

I have several such data files in a folder (think several dozens really) on which I run a python script that loads each such data file and creates a surface plot. My python code looks like this:

python code

import os
import glob
import sys
import subprocess
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import numpy as np

from numpy import *
from numpy.random import rand
from pylab import pcolor, show, colorbar, xticks, yticks
from pylab import *

for fname in glob.glob('*profile*.dat'):
    with open(fname) as f:
        data = np.loadtxt(fname)
        z = np.array(data)

    x,y = np.meshgrid(range(data.shape[0]), range(data.shape[1]))

    fig = plt.figure()

    ax = fig.gca(projection='3d')
    ax.plot_surface(x, y, z, rstride=5, cstride=5,cmap="binary",linewidth=0.1)
    ax.set_zlim3d(0.0,4.0)

    ax.set_xlabel('X',fontsize=16,fontweight="bold")
    ax.set_ylabel('Y',fontsize=16,fontweight="bold")
    ax.set_zlabel('h(X,T)',fontsize=16,fontweight="bold")
    savefig('/home/uid/Desktop/'+fname.replace(".dat","")+'.eps',figsize=(5,5),dpi=600)
    savefig('/home/uid/Desktop/'+fname.replace(".dat","")+'.pdf',figsize=(5,5),dpi=600)

print "Profile plots have been saved!"
"EOF"

The plot looks like so:

Observations/What I am trying to accomplish:

What I need to do is change the xticks and yticks to other numbers. What is shown in the plot are actually "grid points" used. My X and Y lengths are actually "50 units" each with about 265 grid points used in each direction.

How do I change the xticks and yticks to show "0... 50" on the x and y axis?

I apologize if this question seems sophomoric but I have been searching for ways to go about it but have come up with only a minimal set of answers. 1 2.

Answer 1

Assuming the 266 points in each data dimension (i.e. data.shape = (266, 266)) represent 0...50, then you can simply scale the meshgrid() output:

x,y = np.meshgrid(range(data.shape[0]), range(data.shape[1]))
x *= 50./data.shape[0]
y *= 50./data.shape[1]

If you also need to modify their frequency, then just directly modify xticks() and yticks() manually or programmatically as suggested by the second answer you found:

ax.set_xticks([0., 15., 30., 45.])
num_ticks = 5.
ax.set_yticks(arange(num_ticks)/(num_ticks-1) * 50)