Barchart (o plot) 3D in Python

Question

I need to plot some data in various forms. Currently I'm using Matplotlib and I'm fairly happy with the plots I'm able to produce.

This question is on how to plot the last one. The data is similar to the "distance table", like this (just bigger, my table is 128x128 and still have 3 or more number per element).

Now, my data is much better "structured" than a distance table (my data doesn't varies "randomly" like in a alphabetically sorted distance table), thus a 3D barchart, or maybe 3 of them, would be perfect. My understanding is that such a chart is missing in Matplotlib.

I could use a (colored) Countor3d like these or something in 2D like imshow, but it isn't really well representative of what the data is (the data has meaning just in my 128 points, there isn't anything between two points). And the height of bars is more readable than color, IMO.

Thus the questions:

1. is it possible to create 3D barchart in Matplotlib? It should be clear that I mean with a 2D domain, not just a 2D barchart with a "fake" 3D rendering for aesthetics purposes
2. if the answer to the previous question is no, then is there some other library able to do that? I strongly prefer something Python-based, but I'm OK with other Linux-friendly possibilities
3. if the answer to the previous question is no, then do you have any suggestions on how to show that data? E.g. create a table with the values, superimposed to the imshow or other colored way?

Answer 1

For some time now, matplotlib had no 3D support, but it has been added back recently. You will need to use the svn version, since no release has been made since, and the documentation is a little sparse (see examples/mplot3d/demo.py). I don't know if mplot3d supports real 3D bar charts, but one of the demos looks a little like it could be extended to something like that.

Edit: The source code for the demo is in the examples but for some reason the result is not. I mean the test_polys function, and here's how it looks like:

example figure http://www.iki.fi/jks/tmp/poly3d.png

The test_bar2D function would be even better, but it's commented out in the demo as it causes an error with the current svn version. Might be some trivial problem, or something that's harder to fix.

Answer 2

MyavaVi2 can make 3D barcharts (scroll down a bit). Once you have MayaVi/VTK/ETS/etc. installed it all works beautifully, but it can be some work getting it all installed. Ubuntu has all of it packaged, but they're the only Linux distribution I know that does.