[Matplotlib-users] Reliefplot (imshow with shading)

Dear all,

I am using matplotlib with a great pleasure, and I enjoy its capabilities.
I have recently attended a conference where the invited speaker showed 
great visualizations of arrays from both experiments and simulations. 
His plots were basically looking like those produced by imshow, that is 
a luminance array rendered as a colormap image, but with the additionnal 
use of a shading, which gives a really great feeling to the image. You 
can feel the height of each part of the image.

I have tried to find what software could have produced such a plot, and 
found the ReliefPlot function of Mathematica, which has precisely this 
purpose : rendering a colormap image from an array with a shading to 
give the perception of relief.

The documentation and its examples are self-explanatory :
http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/ReliefPlot.html
(look in particular at the first "neat example" at the bottom of that page)

The two "live" demonstrations illustrate this plot style quite well too :
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ReliefShadedElevationMap/
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/VoronoiImage/

So here are my questions :
Is there a trick to generate an image with such a shading in matplotlib ?
If not, do you know of a python tool that could help ?
Where could I start if I want to code it myself in matplotlib ?

Thanks for your help.

Best regards,

Timothée Lecomte

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