Hello Acer, thanks for your very helpful response.  It solves my immediate problem.

I attempted to extend your examples by querying indets(G,'specfunc(:-ORIENTATION)') in order to get the plot's current orientation but it just returned the empty set.  I did "lprint(G)" to see G's contents but apparently there is no orientation information in it.  Is there some other trick to extract a 3D plot's orientation information?

I know that normally one can read the orientation angles theta, phi, and psi in Maple's toolbar.  Unfortunately that toolbar is not available when Maple displays an animation.

Rouben