matplotlib surface plot limited by the boundaries

Question

Is there any kind of chance to "cut" the surface plot (x,y,z) made by use of the matplotlib by some well defined boundaries, so that I can draw any kind of shape in 3D. Now I can do that but x,y are 2D arrays (meshgrid) and the shape is always rectangular.

Example:

Here, the plate has a base-shape of rectangular (2d-array are used). The z coordinates are derived by some function f=f(x,y).

What I would like achieve is shown in the picture below (made by hand ;)). One idea is to turn-off a single cell. But how to make the cells transparent?

Answer 1

What you'd like is to mask some regions in the surface. Unfortunately, matplotlib does not support masked arrays yet for plot_surface , but you could circumvent it by using np.nan for those masked regions. It is also detailed in plotting-a-masked-surface-plot-using-python-numpy-and-matplotlib .