How to set arbitrary colors for bars in a 3D bar plot?

Question

Say that I have a matrix Z with some values, and I want to illustrate it by a plotting the values in Z by height. The first solution comes to mind

Answer 1

While I find EBH's solution aesthetically more pleasing, here there is a simpler solution: interpolation

z = peaks(5);
[x,y]=meshgrid(1:0.1:size(z,1),1:0.1:size(z,2));
zn=interp2(z,x,y,'nearest');
% plot it
surf(zn,'edgecolor','none','facecolor','interp')