Plotting 3D bars over a grid in Matlab

Question

I have a matrix, A, that contains 50 rows and 4 columns, and the entries are filled with integers. My interest is to construct a stacked 3D bar plot from this data. However, using bar3(A,'stacked') creates a row of 50 bars, whereas I want the bars to be plotted at the coordinates of a grid of size 5 (vertical) x 10 (horizontal). So the first bar in the row would be at location (1,1), second bar at (1,2), 11th bar at (2,1) and so on until the 50th bar which would be at (5,10). I can't seem to find a way to do this in Matlab, is this possible at all?

Thank you in advance!

That's a terrible idea. 3D bar plots should be illegal, and so should stacked bar plots. Because neither allows for a clear reading of the data points, nor the relationship between them. There are better ways to present your data. — Cris Luengo

Jorge Pérez Jorge Pérez · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-21T00:37:55

I agree with @cris, there are better ways to represent your data. However, something like this would work if you still want to do use a 3D bar plot:

figure
hold on

for i = 1:5
    Ai = A(10*(i-1)+1:10*i,:);
    h = bar3(1:10,Ai,'stacked');

    for ih = 1 :length(h)
        x = get(h(ih), 'Xdata');
        set(h(ih), 'Xdata', x+i-1);
    end

end
view(3)

Plotting 3D bars over a grid in Matlab

1 Answers