Shapely Difference on multiple MultiLineStrings

Question

I have written a function blade that returns a Shapely MultiLineString. I would like to be able to run blade n-times, and have each subsequent call only be the difference of all the previous calls.

blade_list = []
    for k in range(self.number_of_blades):
        the_x = vsk.random(self.x_margin, vsk.width - self.x_margin)
        the_length = vsk.random(self.min_length_of_blade, self.max_length_of_blade)
        the_sway = vsk.random(self.min_sway_width, self.max_sway_width)
        a_blade = blade(the_x, the_length, the_sway)
        blade_list.append(a_blade)

    def get_intersected(linesstring, multilinestrings):
        inter_list = []
        for mls in multilinestrings:
            for ls in mls:
                if ls.intersects(linesstring):
                    inter_list.append(ls)
        return inter_list

    occlude_list = []
    for blades in blade_list:
        for segments in blades:
            inter_list = get_intersected(segments, blade_list)
            for occluded_lines in inter_list:
                occluded_lines = occluded_lines.difference(segments)
                occlude_list.append(occluded_lines)

    for ls in occlude_list:
        vsk.geometry(ls)

This is the output from running above. The intended effect would be each 'blade' being overlapped by the next, but as it is you can still 'see through them'.

I'm still teaching myself, so apologies in advance if this ends up being just a very silly problem, but I've been running into walls the last couple days trying to figure it out. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The answer was to make the function return both a multilinestring and a polygon.