Specify absolute colour for 3D points in MayaVi

Question

I am using the MayaVi Python library to plot 3d points, using the points3d class. The documentation specifies that the colour of each point is specified through a fourth argument, s:

In addition, you can pass a fourth array s of the same shape as x, y, and z giving an associated scalar value for each point, or a function f(x, y, z) returning the scalar value. This scalar value can be used to modulate the color and the size of the points.

This specifies a scalar value for each point, which maps the point to a colourmap, such as copper, jet or hsv. E.g. from their documentation:

import numpy
from mayavi.mlab import *

def test_points3d():
    t = numpy.linspace(0, 4*numpy.pi, 20)
    cos = numpy.cos
    sin = numpy.sin

    x = sin(2*t)
    y = cos(t)
    z = cos(2*t)
    s = 2+sin(t)

    return points3d(x, y, z, s, colormap="copper", scale_factor=.25)

Gives:

Instead, I would like to specify the actual value for each point as an (r, g, b) tuple. Is this possible in MayaVi? I have tried replacing the s with an array of tuples, but an error is thrown.

Answer 1

This can now simply be done with the color argument

from mayavi import mlab
import numpy as np

c = np.random.rand(200, 3)
r = np.random.rand(200) / 10.

mlab.points3d(c[:, 0], c[:, 1], c[:, 2], r, color=(0.2, 0.4, 0.5))

mlab.show()