TITLE: Traditional axes in 3d Mathematica plots?
QUESTION [19 upvotes]: Is there any way to tell Mathematica 7 to use "traditional" axes rather than boxing a three-dimensional graph?  That is, rather than the default view produced by
Plot3D[Exp[-x^2 - y^2], {x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2},Boxed->False],

I would like three "axis arrows" to emanate from the origin.

REPLY [12 votes]: In the end, I ended up writing my own arrow routine, which produces scalable arrowheads and scalable labels:

axes[x_, y_, z_, f_, a_] := 
   Graphics3D[
    Join[{Arrowheads[a]}, 
     Arrow[{{0, 0, 0}, #}] & /@ {{x, 0, 0}, {0, y, 0}, {0, 0, 
        z}}, {
      Text[Style["x", FontSize -> Scaled[f]], {0.9*x, 0.1*y, 0.1*z}], 
      Text[Style["y", FontSize -> Scaled[f]], {0.1 x, 0.9*y, 0.1*z}], 
      Text[Style["z", FontSize -> Scaled[f]], {0.1*x, 0.1*y, 0.9*z}]}]]

The arguments are the x, y, and z positions of the x, y, and z arrows, respectively, f is the font scale (try about 0.05), and a is the arrowhead scale (about 0.05 should do it).  This is combined with ordinary 3D graphics using Show[], as in 

Show[Plot3D[Exp[-x^2 - y^2], {x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2}, Boxed -> False, 
    PlotStyle -> Opacity[0.7], Mesh -> 4, Axes -> None], 
   axes[2.5, 2.5, 1.5, 0.05, 0.02], 
   PlotRange -> {{-3, 3}, {-3, 3}, {0, 1.5}}]

The resulting plot is