# Parametric surface plot of custom indexed array

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/parametric-surface-plot-of-custom-indexed-array/71359
**Category:** General Usage
**Tags:** plotting
**Created:** [November 12, 2021, 1:41am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/parametric-surface-plot-of-custom-indexed-array/71359 "2021-11-12T01:41:43Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

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### Author: ![Oko](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/oko/32/22734_2.png) [@Oko](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Oko)
#### Post date: [November 16, 2021, 9:37pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/parametric-surface-plot-of-custom-indexed-array/71359/2 "2021-11-16T21:37:59Z")

</div>

Due to my low trust level I can’t edit the post so I am replying to my own question. The above problem can be trivially seen as a parametric surface plot. What I was looking for is the equivalent of Mathematica’s [ParametricPlot3D](https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/ParametricPlot3D.html) function.

It is definitely doable using vanilla Plots package but the documentation is a bit lacking and it is definitely  
[not a one-liner](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/drawing-parametric-surfaces-in-plots-jl/36560/9). I stumbled onto the package  
[Axl](http://axl.inria.fr/doc/Axl.jl/fcts/parametric/) that is supposedly doing what I want but I don’t want to turn my Julia installation into a package kitchen-sink.

This is a minimal working example of the helicoid plot

```julia
#!/usr/bin/julia
using Debugger
using Plots;plotlyjs()

X(r,t) = r*cos(t)
Y(r,t) = r*sin(t)
Z(r,t) = 3*t
 
r_range = LinRange(0, 1, 200) 
t_range = LinRange(0, 4*pi, 400)

x_grid = [X(r,t) for r in r_range, t in t_range]
y_grid = [Y(r,t) for r in r_range, t in t_range]
z_grid = [Z(r,t) for r in r_range, t in t_range]

plot(x_grid, y_grid, z_grid, st = :surface, xlabel = "x", ylabel = "y", zlabel = "z")

```

And the output

![helicoid](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/1/3/13c6ac0dad541c3b9f86913c4a95c39234c55050.png)

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