Re: [Matplotlib-users] mplot3d stays?

[John H. <jd...@gm...>]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 7:15 PM, David Arnold <dwa...@su...> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> What prevents me from using mplot3d in the classroom is highlighted by the following example.

I believe the problem arises because each artist (ie each polygon,
line or 3d text object) is rendered separately, and so there is no way
different faces from the same object to be rendered on different sides
of another object in the scene.

I am no expert on the mplot3d internals or pipeline, but it seems like
the solution is for each artist to transform the faces of their
respective polys and place them in a Axes3D level list (or other data
structure) along with their properties (eg facecolor, alpha) and then
do a zordering and clipping at the axes level rather than the artist
level before rendering.  One might use a custom PolyCollection for
this....

For those of you with more familiarity with mplot3d internals: is this
approach viable/feasible?

JDH