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 found a nice workaround: After plotting the data, do another plot on top with the same color and lighter line style. Instead of Poly3DCollection I use Line3DCollection, so no faces are plotted. The result looks very much as anticipated.

See below the new plot and the script creating it.

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.art3d import Poly3DCollection, Line3DCollection

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 = list(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)
ax.add_collection3d(Poly3DCollection(poly3d, facecolors='w', linewidths=1, alpha=0.5))
ax.add_collection3d(Line3DCollection(poly3d, colors='k', linewidths=0.2, linestyles=':'))

plt.show()