How to plot pseudo-3d bar chart in matplotlib?

Question

I'd like to prepare some statistics for my boss. The flat style of matplotlib bar chart would make them look cheap for those used to Excel charts, although for clarity, using styles like this probably should be avoided.

I'm not that far away, but I don't get how to give the right thickness of the bars:

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

row = [0, 0, 0, 22, 0, 0, 4, 16, 2, 0, 4, 4, 12, 26]
length = len(row)
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
x = np.arange(length)
y = np.zeros(14)
z = np.array(row)
width = 0.8
ax.bar3d(x, y, [0]*length, 0.5, 0.001, z)
ax.set_xticks(x + width/2)
ax.set_xticklabels(titles[2:], rotation=90)
ax.set_yticks(y)
ax.set_zlabel('count')
plt.show()

Result:

Answer 1

The thickness of the bars are set by the dx, dy arguments in ax.bar3d for which you have the values 0.5, 0.001 . The issue, as I'm sure you noticed is that changing dy will change the length of the bar (in your case the untitled axis), but matplotlib helpfully rescales the y axis so the data fills it. This makes it look strange (I am assuming this is the problem, sorry if it isn't).

To remedy this you could set the y limits using ax.set_ylim(0, 0.002) (basically your y values go from 0->0.001). If you change either dy or the value of y given to bar3d which is currently 0, then you will need to update the limits accordingly.

Example:

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

row = [0, 0, 0, 22, 0, 0, 4, 16, 2, 0, 4, 4, 12, 26]
length = len(row)
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
ax.bar3d(range(length), [0]*length, [0]*length, 0.5, 0.001, row)

ax.set_ylim(-0.005, 0.005)
plt.show()