I recommend to not use Matplotlib for 3d plotting at all. You will hit a wall sooner or later. Even though there are cool looking plots around, it does not work well especially if you want to visualize scatter plots with many data points. And it will fail for sure if you want to plot colorized triangular meshes or complex surfaces.
Instead use one of the following toolkits:
- https://docs.enthought.com/mayavi/mayavi/ (3d, fast, nice)
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http://www.pyqtgraph.org/ (2d/3d, very fast)
A very good example showing different approaches for multiple real time plots can be found here
-
https://plot.ly/python/3d-surface-plots/ (2d/3d, nice)
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http://vispy.org/documentation.html (2d/3d, very fast, nice, requires OpenGL)
Might be the future, check the high-level functions vispy.plot() and vispy.scene(), I guess they made some progress)
For examples see here, look for the ones with “scene”. There also seems to be some interface to use Vispy to render Matplotlib plots.