title: Imitating the waterfall plots in Origin with Matplotlib
body: <p>I am attempting to create the waterfall plots made by Origin (see image below) with Python and Matplotlib. </p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/E3A18.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/E3A18.png" alt="Origin Waterfall"></a></p>
  
  <p>or <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/K9HDp.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/K9HDp.png" alt="Gnuplot"></a></p>
  
  <p>The general scheme makes sense to me, you start with a 2D matrix as if you wanted to make a surface plot, and then you can follow any of the recipes shown in <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11209646/waterfall-plot-python">the StackOverflow question here</a>. The idea is to plot each line of the matrix as an individual curve in 3D space.</p>
  
  <p>This matplotlib method results in a plot like the one below:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/PtfJp.png" alt="Matplotlib Waterfall"></p>
  
  <p>The struggle I am having is that the sense of perspective that is clear in the Origin plot is lost in the matplotlib version. You can argue that this is partially due to the camera angle, but I think more importantly it comes from the closer lines appearing "in front" of the lines that are farther away. </p>
  
  <p>My question is, how would you properly imitate the waterfall plot from Origin in Matplotlib with the perspective effect? I don't really understand what it is about the two plots that's so different, so even defining the exact problem is difficult.</p>