How to visualize scalar 2D data with Matplotlib?

Question

So i have a meshgrid (matrices X and Y) together with scalar data (matrix Z), and i need to visualize this. Preferably some 2D image with colors at the points showing the value

Answer 1

In case anyone comes across this article looking for what I was looking for, I took the above example and modified it to use imshow with an input stack of frames, instead of generating and using contours on the fly. Starting with a 3D array of images of shape (nBins, nBins, nBins), called frames.

def animate_frames(frames):
    nBins   = frames.shape[0]
    frame   = frames[0]
    tempCS1 = plt.imshow(frame, cmap=plt.cm.gray)
    for k in range(nBins):
        frame   = frames[k]
        tempCS1 = plt.imshow(frame, cmap=plt.cm.gray)
        del tempCS1
        fig.canvas.draw()
        #time.sleep(1e-2) #unnecessary, but useful
        fig.clf()

fig = plt.figure()
ax  = fig.add_subplot(111)

win = fig.canvas.manager.window
fig.canvas.manager.window.after(100, animate_frames, frames)

I also found a much simpler way to go about this whole process, albeit less robust:

fig = plt.figure()

for k in range(nBins):
    plt.clf()
    plt.imshow(frames[k],cmap=plt.cm.gray)
    fig.canvas.draw()
    time.sleep(1e-6) #unnecessary, but useful

Note that both of these only seem to work with ipython --pylab=tk, a.k.a.backend = TkAgg

Thank you for the help with everything.