Arrows on axes in Plot3D

Question

I use the following code to draw arrows on arrows in 2D graphics:

Plot[Sin[x],{x,-10,10},AxesStyle->Arrowheads[Automatic]]

But such code doesn't work with Plot3D[…] and 3D graphics.

Is there any way to get axes with arrows on 3D graphics?

Answer 1

Here is a simple way to do this:

arrowAxes[arrowLength_] :=
  Map[{Apply[RGBColor, #], Arrow[Tube[{{0, 0, 0}, #}]]} &, 
   arrowLength IdentityMatrix[3]]

This function draws three axes with arrows. To apply it:

Graphics3D[{Sphere[], arrowAxes[3]}]

This doesn't have axis labels, though.

To add labels by leveraging the built-in axes, one compromise (to save the work of making all labels by hand) would be to do the following:

Graphics3D[{Sphere[{1, 1, 1}], arrowAxes[3]}, Axes -> True, 
 Boxed -> False, AxesOrigin -> {0, 0, 0}, AxesStyle -> Opacity[0], 
 TicksStyle -> Opacity[1]]

Edit In my attempt at a labeled set of axes above, I deliberately set the axes to be invisible but left the ticks visible. You may find it more visually consistent to keep the default axes visible, together with the new 3D arrow-axes. For this, one could replace AxesStyle above with this: AxesStyle -> MapThread[RGBColor, IdentityMatrix[3]].