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Adding lightsource when plotting Poly3DCollection #19509
Description
I am trying to visualize a .stl file using the libraries numpy-stl and mplot3D.
new_mesh = mesh.Mesh.from_file('result.stl')
figure = plt.Figure(figsize=(6.4,5.4), dpi=100)
ax = mplot3d.Axes3D(figure)
ax.add_collection3d(mplot3d.art3d.Poly3DCollection(new_mesh.vectors))
But in the plot we can barely see any features and its quite flat. Is it possible to add a lightsource option for Poly3DCollections.
Activity
oscargus commented on Aug 8, 2022
This is more or less implemented in Axes3D.plot_surface:
matplotlib/lib/mpl_toolkits/mplot3d/axes3d.py
Lines 1485 to 1490 in cf38c34
I guess an option is to add a method, shade_polygon to Poly3DCollection, or something, that basically does relevant parts of the above code.
I mark is as a good first issue since there is template code, but probably medium as it requires a bit of thinking. For example, which parameters to use.
Some other collections do have a depthshade argument to the constructor and one may consider using that here as well (although those are not really the same).
oscargus commented on Oct 22, 2022
Another option, if someone bumps into this, is to provide edgecolors, which they at least will result in the edges being articulated.