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How to make data points in a 3D python scatter plot look like "discs" instead of "spheres"

In a standard 3D python plot, each data point is, by default, represented as a sphere in 3D. For the data I'm plotting, the z-axis is very sensitive, while the x and y axes are very general, so is there a way to make each point on the scatter plot spread out over the x and y direction as it normally would with, for example, s=500, but not spread at all along the z-axis? Ideally this would look like a set of stacked discs, rather than overlapping spheres.
Any ideas? I'm relatively new to python and I don't know if there's a way to make custom data points like this with a scatter plot.

I actually was able to do this using the matplotlib.patches library, creating a patch for every data point, and then making it whatever shape I wanted with the help of mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.art3d.

You might look for something called "jittering". Take a look at
Matplotlib: avoiding overlapping datapoints in a "scatter/dot/beeswarm" plot
It works by adding random noise to your data.
Another way might be to reduce the variance of the data on your z-axis (e.g. applying a log-function) or adjusting the scale. You could do that with ax.set_zscale("log"). It is documented here http://matplotlib.org/mpl_toolkits/mplot3d/api.html#mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.axes3d.Axes3D.set_zscale

Python: how to plot points with little overlapping

I am using python to plot points. The plot shows relationship between area and the # of points of interest (POIs) in this area. I have 3000 area values and 3000 # of POI values.
Now the plot looks like this:
The problem is that, at lower left side, points are severely overlapping each other so it is hard to get enough information. Most areas are not that big and they don't have many POIs.
I want to make a plot with little overlapping. I am wondering whether I can use unevenly distributed axis or use histogram to make a beautiful plot. Can anyone help me?

I would suggest using a logarithmic scale for the y axis. You can either use pyplot.semilogy(...) or pyplot.yscale('log') (http://matplotlib.org/api/pyplot_api.html).
Note that points where area <= 0 will not be rendered.

I think we have two major choices here. First adjusting this plot, and second choosing to display your data in another type of plot.
In the first option, I would suggest clipping the boundries. You have plenty of space around the borders. If you limit the plot to the boundries, your data would scale better. On top of it, you may choose to plot the points with smaller dots, so that they would seem less overlapping.
Second option would be to choose displaying data in a different view, such as histograms. This might give a better insight in terms of distribution of your data among different bins. But this would be completely different type of view, in regards to the former plot.
I would suggest trying to adjust the plot by limiting the boundries of the plot to the data points, so that the plot area would have enough space to scale the data and try using histograms later. But as I mentioned, these are two different things and would give different insights about your data.
For adjusting you might try this:
x1,x2,y1,y2 = plt.axis()
plt.axis((x1,x2,y1,y2))
You would probably need to make minor adjustments to the axis variables. Note that there should definetly be better options instead of this, but this was the first thing that came to my mind.

Equal bin sizes including border using mayavi imshow?

I am doing a very simple task of plotting a 2d numpy histogram and displaying with with
mayavi.mlab.imshow(my2dhistogram, interpolate=False)
For a 5x5 array the output is the following,
I would like the bins along the border to be the same size as the ones in the center. I understand the logic of what mayavi is doing but for this application I absolutely need the bins to be equal size. This is for a scientific visualization where each bin represents a measurement on a detector surface.
Any suggestions?

I don't know how to do this the right way (it seems like it would be very difficult to get right from what I know about imshow), but I have a conceptual suggestion.
Represent your NxN matrix of items on the surface with an (N+2)x(N+2) matrix and set the border entries to be -1. Then make a customized colormap such that your desired colormap is contained between 0 and 1, with all other entries as (0,0,0,0). I'm not exactly sure how to do that -- iirc mayavi modules don't allow you to setup discontinuous color tables, but you could still hack it in this way. Let me know if the part about the color table is confusing, and I can provide some code to make it work.
Also, is there a reason you need to use mayavi's imshow as opposed to say matplotlib for this essentially 2D problem?

Plotting multivalued surface in mayavi

mayavi
I have some data which is on a structured grid in the X and Y directions and is unstructured in the Z direction. This is in the form of a list of data points, e.g [[x,y,z], [x2,y2,z2], ...]. There are 2 points corresponding to most x,y coordinates, and the data is double valued in the z dimension. I would like to plot this shape as an enclosed surface, and if possible remove one of the walls.
I have tried the advice here: http://docs.enthought.com/mayavi/mayavi/auto/example_surface_from_irregular_data.html#example-surface-from-irregular-data
When I try this only the bottom half of the plot is covered by the surface. I also get this message which I don' understand: No handlers could be found for logger "mayavi.core.common". I would love to know why this is.
I have tried plotting the top and bottom surfaces separately, but this looks a bit ugly. Here is what that looks like:
matplotlib
I have also tried to grid my data and follow the advice using the matplotlib demos. I can't post the link to this because I don't have the reputation, but if you google matplotlib plot3D demos it is in the first result.
I can't get this to produce anything reasonable. I think this is because I don't really understand how the sphere example on that web page could be adapted to work with data rather than a function.
Question
how can I adapt the code I have from the link I provided to produce a plot of an enclosed surface?
or, how can I use matplotlib to make the enclosed surface?
Or is there some other program/function I ought to be using for this kind of problem?

Need to add a "legend" to an arrow/contour plot

I am plotting some scalar data as a contour plot with matplotlib.contourf. On top of it, I am plotting some vector data with matplotlib.arrow. The basic plot has come along OK, but now I need to put a box on the plot with a default-size arrow plus the data value to which it corresponds, so the viewer will know what kind of scale he is looking at. For instance, I need a box with a horizontal arrow of some length and, below that, some text like "10 cm/sec".
First, if anyone can give me a simple approach to this, I would be grateful.
Second, the approach I have tried is to do the contour plot, then plot the arrows, then add a rectangle to the plot like so:
rect=pl.Rectangle((300,70),15,15,fc='white')
pl.gca().add_patch(rect)
and then, finally, put my scale arrow and text on top of this rectangle.
This isn't working because the rectangle patch covers up the contour, but it doesn't cover up the arrows in the plot. Is there a way to move the patch completely "to the front" of everything else?

Got it. Using pylab.quiver and pylab.quiverkey functions. quiver produces a nice vector field with just a few lines of code, and quiverkey makes it easy to produce a scaling vector with text. And, for some reason, the arrows plotted with quiver are indeed covered by my rectangle, so it is easy to make the scaling arrow very visible. There are still some mysteries in all of this for me. If anyone wants to try to clear them up, would be much obliged. But I have a way now to do what I need in this instance.