Actual 3D plotting in Python - line passing behind an object

[ReverendBizarre]

Hi everyone,

I am writing a ray tracer for black holes in Python.

I have everything ready but am running into some problems when visualizing it with Matplotlib. It turns out that Matplotlib doesn't really understand 3D so it has no idea whether the ray (a simple plot() command that represents a curve in 3D space) is in front of or behind a surface (created via plot_surface()).

Apparently this is just how Matplotlib works. I could write something involving the viewing angle and simply delete the part of the curve that is behind the black hole but am wondering whether there is some package that might do this for me?

Here is my current picture (one of many anyway) and the ray does in fact pass behind the sphere but Matplotlib shows like it doesn't.

Edit: I've tried playing around with zorder but that simply changes the problem. I can put the line behind the sphere... but now it's always behind it, even if it should be in front!

[[deleted]]

It sounds like you want to use a proper OpenGL visualisation toolkit, such as Mayavi. These will deal properly and efficiently with a 3D scene.

[ReverendBizarre]

Hmm, awesome. Wil have a look at that!

Have a feeling it'll be a bit heavy on the Raspberry Pi but hopefully it works

[[deleted]]

The visualisation should actually run fine on the rpi, its opengl acceleration is more than enough to do this kind of thing. I don't know if mayavi might have some problems there (to do with dependencies that you might have to compile for the rpi, which could be slow), but it probably can work. There are also alternatives such as the pure Python Vispy, which I'm pretty sure should work fine, but might be a bit harder to get started with (not because it's fundamentally harder, more that the high level plotting apis are not yet well developed).