Can Mayavi render a figure scene with a transparent background?

Question

I am generating a mesh plot using mayavi.mlab and want the background opacity to be 0. (or transparent). Is this possible?

Answer 1

You cannot set the transparency directly. However, you can save the figure with a background colour (different than the foreground colour) and use ImageMagick to remove the background

For example

mlab.figure(size = (1024,768),\
            bgcolor = (1,1,1), fgcolor = (0.5, 0.5, 0.5))

# Your fantastic plotting script

mlab.save('pure_beauty.png')

now use ImageMagick to remove the background

convert pure_beauty.png -transparent white pure_transparent_beauty.png

like shown here.