How to set arbitrary colors for bars in a 3D bar plot?

Question

Say that I have a matrix Z with some values, and I want to illustrate it by a plotting the values in Z by height. The first solution comes to mind

Answer 1

This is a partial answer.

The case of using the bar height as color is covered by the official MATLAB documentation. Essentially the example code boils down to:

function q45423394
hB = bar3(peaks(25)); colorbar;
for indE = 1:numel(hB)
  hB(indE).CData = hB(indE).ZData;
end

All you need to do afterwards is make sure that the colormap is the one you want.