Question

I’m wondering if it is possible to get the same grouping behavior of bar plots into bar3.
For example, if you plot

  bar(rand(3));

you get 3 bars for each point; bar groups the different y values for each x. Now I would like to do the same with a 3D data. That is that I have several slices of 2D data that I want to visualize as groups of bars. Then, if my data is

data = rand(3,3,2);

I would like to see data(1,1,:) as a group of bars, and data(1,2,:) as another group and so on.

Is it possible? I cannot find a way of achieving this.

Edit: I’m adding more details, to explain it better.

Lets said that we have two, or more, sets of data {x_(i,j)^s}. What I need is to group in the same grid position (i,j), all the sets s. In this question, they are grouping the data sets side by side, not element-wise, like this:

x1(s1) x1(s2) x1(s3)   x2(s1) x2(s2) x2(s3)   x3(s1) x3(s2) x3(s3)
x4(s1) x4(s2) x4(s3)   x5(s1) x5(s2) x5(s3)   x6(s1) x6(s2) x6(s3)
x7(s1) x7(s2) x7(s3)   x8(s1) x8(s2) x8(s3)   x9(s1) x9(s2) x9(s3)

I would like the bar command behavior, it tends to group when putting more than one data set. I would like to know if it is possible.

Answer 1

I am not sure I fully understood, but if you are looking for grouped behavior like you mention with bar(rand(3)) then you can try

figure; bar3(rand(5),'grouped');
% or maybe
figure; bar3(rand(5),'stacked');

or try to rearrange the data in data so it can work better with bar3 with reshape:

data = rand(3,3,2);
% now each data(i, j, :) will be in single row 
changeddata = reshape(data , [size(data , 1)*size(data , 2) 2]);
figure; bar3(changeddata);
figure; bar3(changeddata ,'grouped');
figure; bar3(changeddata ,'stacked');

Maybe if you can give a code example for how it’s supposed to look in one group, it would help to understand your question better.