To my understanding we do not compute any sort of 3D intersections or have a proper z-buffer (either of which could be used to implement this) and both of which would be pretty major efforts to implement.

@a113n are you interested in working on this?

@tacaswell instead of implementing code to compute 3D intersections or z-buffer, could zlim_3d clip the data properly just like the workaround below?

# Adapted from http://matplotlib.org/2.0.2/examples/mplot3d/bars3d_demo.html
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.ticker as ticker
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np


# Funcformatter to simulate zlim_3d
def major_formatter(x, pos):
    return "{:.1f}".format(x+0.2)

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
for c, z in zip(['r', 'g', 'b', 'y'], [30, 20, 10, 0]):
    xs = np.arange(20)
    ys = np.random.rand(20)
    
    # Simulate zlim_3d by subtracting the min limit
    ys -= 0.2
    ys[ys < 0] = 0

    # You can provide either a single color or an array. To demonstrate this,
    # the first bar of each set will be colored cyan.
    cs = [c] * len(xs)
    cs[0] = 'c'
    ax.bar(xs, ys, zs=z, zdir='y', color=cs, alpha=0.8)

ax.set_xlabel('X')
ax.set_ylabel('Y')
ax.set_zlabel('Z')

# Shift the tick labels up by 0.2
ax.zaxis.set_major_formatter(ticker.FuncFormatter(major_formatter))

plt.show()

Result:

That works for this case where you know the shift and use it to both adjust the data and the tick labels. However I don't see how to generalize it.

It would also be odd if it only worked in the z-direction, not x and y.

The code passes zdir='y' which is why the layering is in the y direction instead of z.

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There is some discussion about this desired behavior in #25804

#27349 will implement option B from the graphic below, but option C is really the thrust of the original question here.

Unfortunately, implementing that would require a huge rewrite of the 3D renderer to do proper culling with a z-buffer or 3D intersections, as @tacaswell mentioned in his comment. I don't think there's anyone able to do that right now, though if someone wants to take it on as a project it'd be awesome.