title: What lightweight python library for simple scientific visualization in 3D
body: <p>I am writing a program in python to experiment an academic idea.  Look at a resultant image the program generates:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://imgur.com/zgdiP.png" alt="leaf"></p>
  
  <p>The thick skeleton lines in the middle of the leaf is what need to be visualized.  Every segment of the skeleton lines has a value associated with it, in the above image (drawn by <code>pycairo</code>), different shades of gray are used for visualization, the lighter color means higher value, black lines indicate the lines have value 0 associated with them.  The problem is visualization using colors in this case is very unintuitive for human eyes, it would be much better to visualize the values in 3D like the following (taken from a paper):</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://imgur.com/MExU1.png" alt="2d in 3d"></p>
  
  <p>the left image is a 3D visualization of the right one, the values associated with the lines are visualized as height of consecutive walls in 3D.</p>
  
  <p>What is the best library to do this?  I don't want to invest much time into doing this, so a lightweight library is preferred.</p>