Significant improvements have been made to the look of 3-D plots. They also render faster and use less memory. In addition, a number of new features previously available only for 2-D plots are now available for 3-D plots. These include the ability to use typeset mathematics and text in titles, captions, axis labels, and text objects, as well as the ability to edit them in-place. Drawing on 3-D plots and improved control of tickmark spacing are now available. Interactive control of plot properties, including that offered through context menus, is also improved. More information is available on these help pages: plot3d/options, plot/typesetting, plot/tickmarks.

You can now export 3-D plots to .x3d, .dae, and .x3d geometry file formats. X3D is an open standard file format used to represent 3-D models using XML. For more information on the X3D format, visit http://www.web3d.org/x3d/what-x3d/. COLLADA (.dae) files are XML files based on the COLLADA schema and are used for exchanging 3-D graphics information between graphics programs. For more information on COLLADA files, visit http://www.khronos.org/collada/.

The new viewpoint option allows you to create an animation by varying the viewpoint through a 3-D plot, as if a camera were flying through the plot. Many suboptions are available to allow you to control the animation. You can use one of the standard paths or define your own path by specifying camera locations. The camera orientation, field of view, and number of frames are all adjustable. For more information, see the plot3d/viewpoint help page.

The new aligncolumns option has been added to the plots[display] command so that you can align the x-axes of plots contained in arrays of plots. For example, you may have several plots in a column with the same x-range, but their x-axes start at slightly different positions because they have different y-axis labels using varying amounts of space. The aligncolumns option forces all the x-axes to line up with one another in a column. It is also possible to align only a subset of the plots in an array if alignment of all columns is not desired. More information can be found on the plot/arrayplot help page.

The plot and plot3d commands have been updated to recognize units in the function and range arguments, for both the expression-form and operator-form of the calling sequences. The default axis labels display the units information deduced from the arguments. More information about this feature is available on the plot/units help page.