Parameters required by bar3d with python

Question

I want to make a 3d bar plot with python, and I discovered the bar3d function. Here is the documentation. I do not understand which values I have to pass over to bar3d, documentation only tells me something about the appropriate format. I have found a few example on the internet, and also on stackoverflow, but these didn't help me to figure out which parameter contains which information.

Basically, this is my function:

bar3d(x, y, z, dx, dy, dz, color='b', zsort='average', *args, **kwargs)

I do not understand what x, y, z and dx, dy, dz do represent. Can anyone pls help me?

Answer 1

x, y, z, dx, dy, dz are iterators. They represent the x and y, z positions of each bar and dx, dy, dz represent the width, depth, and height (dimensions in x, y and z) of the bars. Note that x is the horizontal axis, y is the depth axis, and z is the vertical axis.

So 3 bars in a row with height of 5, 4 and 7 could be drawn like:

x = [1, 2, 3]  # x coordinates of each bar
y = [0, 0, 0]  # y coordinates of each bar
z = [0, 0, 0]  # z coordinates of each bar
dx = [0.5, 0.5, 0.5]  # Width of each bar
dy = [0.5, 0.5, 0.5]  # Depth of each bar
dz = [5, 4, 7]        # Height of each bar

All of them would have the same width and depth.

color takes either a string that describes the color of all the bar, or a list of strings, if you want each bar with a different color.

I think zsort has to do with how matplotlib is handling overlaps, but that is just a guess.