Transparency for Poly3DCollection plot in matplotlib

Question

I am trying to draw some objects with the fabulous Matplotlib package for Python. These objects consist of points implemented with plt.scatter() and patches imp

Answer 1

I made a slight modification to the OP code and got the transparency working. It appears that the facecolors argument of Poly3DCollection overrides the transparency argument, so the solution was to set the color in a separate call to either Poly3DCollection.set_color or Poly3DCollection.set_facecolor:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.art3d import Poly3DCollection

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')

x = [0, 2, 1, 1]
y = [0, 0, 1, 0]
z = [0, 0, 0, 1]

vertices = [[0, 1, 2], [0, 1, 3], [0, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3]]

tupleList = zip(x, y, z)

poly3d = [[tupleList[vertices[ix][iy]] for iy in range(len(vertices[0]))] for ix in range(len(vertices))]
ax.scatter(x,y,z)
collection = Poly3DCollection(poly3d, linewidths=1, alpha=0.2)
face_color = [0.5, 0.5, 1] # alternative: matplotlib.colors.rgb2hex([0.5, 0.5, 1])
collection.set_facecolor(face_color)
ax.add_collection3d(collection)

plt.show()

Interestingly, if you explicitly set the edge color with collection.set_edgecolor('k'), the edges will also honor the transparency setting.