[Matplotlib-users] fading line plot

[Paul A. L. <pau...@gm...>]

Hi everyone,

I've been looking into making an animation of a mechanical system. In its first incarnation, my plan was as follows:
1) Make a fading line plot of two variables (say, x and y)
2) Run a series of such plots through ffmpeg/avencode to generate an animation

First, I'm wondering whether there's a built-in way of making a fading line plot, i.e. a plot where one end of the line is plotted with high alpha, the other end with low alpha, and intermediate line segments with linearly scaled alpha. For now, I've done this by manually "chunking" the x and y arrays and plotting each chunk with different alpha. Is there a better way? Is there interest in creating such a plotting function and adding it to matplotlib?

Second, is there a way of integrating the "chunked" generation of fading lines with the animation generating features of matplotlib? It seems possible, although a bit clunky, at present, but maybe someone has a better idea at what overall approach to take than I do.

Cheers
Paul