Rotation of 3D vector?

Use scipy's Rotation.from_rotvec(). The argument is the rotation vector (a unit vector) multiplied by the rotation angle in rads.

from scipy.spatial.transform import Rotation
from numpy.linalg import norm


v = [3, 5, 0]
axis = [4, 4, 1]
theta = 1.2

axis = axis / norm(axis)  # normalize the rotation vector first
rot = Rotation.from_rotvec(theta * axis)

new_v = rot.apply(v)  
print(new_v)    # results in [2.74911638 4.77180932 1.91629719]

There are several more ways to use Rotation based on what data you have about the rotation:

• from_quat Initialized from quaternions.

• from_dcm Initialized from direction cosine matrices.

• from_euler Initialized from Euler angles.

_{Off-topic note: One line code is not necessarily better code as implied by some users.}

It can also be solved using quaternion theory:

def angle_axis_quat(theta, axis):
    """
    Given an angle and an axis, it returns a quaternion.
    """
    axis = np.array(axis) / np.linalg.norm(axis)
    return np.append([np.cos(theta/2)],np.sin(theta/2) * axis)

def mult_quat(q1, q2):
    """
    Quaternion multiplication.
    """
    q3 = np.copy(q1)
    q3[0] = q1[0]*q2[0] - q1[1]*q2[1] - q1[2]*q2[2] - q1[3]*q2[3]
    q3[1] = q1[0]*q2[1] + q1[1]*q2[0] + q1[2]*q2[3] - q1[3]*q2[2]
    q3[2] = q1[0]*q2[2] - q1[1]*q2[3] + q1[2]*q2[0] + q1[3]*q2[1]
    q3[3] = q1[0]*q2[3] + q1[1]*q2[2] - q1[2]*q2[1] + q1[3]*q2[0]
    return q3

def rotate_quat(quat, vect):
    """
    Rotate a vector with the rotation defined by a quaternion.
    """
    # Transfrom vect into an quaternion 
    vect = np.append([0],vect)
    # Normalize it
    norm_vect = np.linalg.norm(vect)
    vect = vect/norm_vect
    # Computes the conjugate of quat
    quat_ = np.append(quat[0],-quat[1:])
    # The result is given by: quat * vect * quat_
    res = mult_quat(quat, mult_quat(vect,quat_)) * norm_vect
    return res[1:]

v = [3, 5, 0]
axis = [4, 4, 1]
theta = 1.2 

print(rotate_quat(angle_axis_quat(theta, axis), v))
# [2.74911638 4.77180932 1.91629719]

Disclaimer: I am the author of this package

While special classes for rotations can be convenient, in some cases one needs rotation matrices (e.g. for working with other libraries like the affine_transform functions in scipy). To avoid everyone implementing their own little matrix generating functions, there exists a tiny pure python package which does nothing more than providing convenient rotation matrix generating functions. The package is on github (mgen) and can be installed via pip:

pip install mgen

Example usage copied from the readme:

import numpy as np
np.set_printoptions(suppress=True)

from mgen import rotation_around_axis
from mgen import rotation_from_angles
from mgen import rotation_around_x

matrix = rotation_from_angles([np.pi/2, 0, 0], 'XYX')
matrix.dot([0, 1, 0])
# array([0., 0., 1.])

matrix = rotation_around_axis([1, 0, 0], np.pi/2)
matrix.dot([0, 1, 0])
# array([0., 0., 1.])

matrix = rotation_around_x(np.pi/2)
matrix.dot([0, 1, 0])
# array([0., 0., 1.])

Note that the matrices are just regular numpy arrays, so no new data-structures are introduced when using this package.

I needed to rotate a 3D model around one of the three axes {x, y, z} in which that model was embedded and this was the top result for a search of how to do this in numpy. I used the following simple function:

def rotate(X, theta, axis='x'):
  '''Rotate multidimensional array `X` `theta` degrees around axis `axis`'''
  c, s = np.cos(theta), np.sin(theta)
  if axis == 'x': return np.dot(X, np.array([
    [1.,  0,  0],
    [0 ,  c, -s],
    [0 ,  s,  c]
  ]))
  elif axis == 'y': return np.dot(X, np.array([
    [c,  0,  -s],
    [0,  1,   0],
    [s,  0,   c]
  ]))
  elif axis == 'z': return np.dot(X, np.array([
    [c, -s,  0 ],
    [s,  c,  0 ],
    [0,  0,  1.],
  ]))