Re: [Matplotlib-users] mplot3d stays?

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

On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Ben Axelrod <BAx...@co...> wrote:
> John, your assesment of the problem is correct.  And I believe your suggested solution is also correct.  Currently, each call to a mplot3d plot method is treated independantly.  They get converted into custom PolyCollections which each do the Z-order sorting.

>
> There is still an issue here however.  Even if we implement the aformentioned solution, we are still only approximating a 3d library.  And the result will still not be as nice as matlab.  I believe that because we treat the surface as a series of 2D polygons, the intersection between two surfaces will be at the polygon edges.  See the attached image for an example of what the intersection between a sphere and plane might look like.

True enough, but as your example shows it would still be a substantial
improvement over what we have now, and by getting all the faces in the
scene into a single data structure, we leave open the possibility of
doing something more sophisticated down the road (like chopping a
problematic face into multiple faces, some in front, some behind, an
intersecting object).

JDH