There is a 'color' argument to Axes3D's bar3d function which can accept arrays to color individual bars different colors - but how would I apply a color map (i.e. cmap = cm.jet) in the same way as a plot_surface function for example ? This would make a bar of a certain height a color which reflects its height.
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/mplot3d/hist3d_demo.html
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/mpl_toolkits/mplot3d/api.html