I am trying to use the MATPLOTLIB python module to produce a plot, I have installed matplotlib in the site-packages folder of my Abaqus installation "C:\\SIMULIA\\Abaqus\\6.13-1\\tools\\SMApy\\python2.6\\Lib\\site-packages\\matplotlib" as per the instructions on stack overflow  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19388864/trying-to-use-matplotlib-with-abaqus-getting-error-involving-dateutil. 

However, when trying to use the fig.savefig('figureName.png') or plt.show() functions of matplotlib within Abaqus it just crashes Abaqus with no trace of an error code or reason why. Initially this was occurring when calling a plotting function using matplotlib features to plot a 3D histogram plot from the kernel script of a gui plugin I am writing, but I can reproduce the same error, just by using the run script function in the file menu of the Abaqus/CAE gui, and running a simple graph plotting script such as the one below, or even one of the example scripts lifted straight from matplotlib.org. 

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D

x = [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1]

y = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]

z = [2,4,1,4,4,4,1,1]

fig = plt.figure()

ax = Axes3D(fig)

ax.scatter(x, y, z)

fig.add_axes(ax)

fig.savefig('test.png')

Debugging the script line by line, the crash only occurs if the fig.savefig() line is within the script or the plt.show() line. if this is commented out, the script will run through to completion without crashing, although obviously it produces no image file, which is the point of the script. 

The stack overflow article referenced above, suggests using matplotlib 1.0.1 64-bit,  for Abaqus 6.12 64-bit, I am using Abaqus 6.13, 64-bit on a Windows 7 machine. So I have tried differnent 64-bit versions of matplotlib to see if this was the issue, namely 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.4, 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.2.1, 1.3.0, 1.3.1.  Versions 1.0.0 to 1.1.0 all exhibit the same behaviour and crash Abaqus with no error message, and versions 1.2.0 and above come up with a RuntimeError: module compiled against API version 6 but this version of numpy is 4, because the version of numpy in included with Abaqus is too old. 

Can anyone help me with this issue and how to get matplotlib, saving figures when run from within Abaqus? Or is there an alternative plotting python module that works better with Abaqus that can produce 3D histogram plots (for visualisation of rainflow counting results). 

Thanks