pcolor() or pcolormesh() for mplot3d

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Hi, I wanted to animate a sequence of 2D data on the faces of a rectangular box and found that there was no good solution. plot_surface() is very slow for the purpose of animation. contourf() is very fast however the contours cannot reveal details down to pixel level.

I understand that the AxesImage class is still not implemented in mplot3d and require a lot of development. On the other hand, the 2D tools pcolor() and pcolormesh() might already be a good target to be employed in 3D, just like contourf() because they generate collections objects. I tried to implement this with my limited knowledge of the mplot3d API, but were not successful.

Therefore, here I put in a feature request and hopefully it can be included in the near future releases of matplotlib. Thanks in advance for the work.

Start by reviewing the mplot3d API alongside the existing plot_surface() and contourf() implementations, then compare how 2D pcolor() and pcolormesh() create collection objects. The issue does not name files or tests, and completion would require defining and validating 3D behavior for rectangular-box faces, including animation performance and pixel-level detail.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.