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 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 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 previouw question is no, then do you have any suggestions in how to show that data? E.g. create a table with the values, superimposed to the imshow or other colored way?

Answer 1

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 distro i know that does.

Answer 2

One more possibility is Gnuplot, which can draw some kind of pseudo 3D bar charts, and gnuplot.py allows interfacing to Gnuplot from Python. I have not tried it myself, though.