PyVista

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3D plotting and mesh analysis through a streamlined interface for the Visualization Toolkit (VTK)

PyVista is...

• "VTK for humans": a high-level API to the Visualization Toolkit (VTK)
• mesh data structures and filtering methods for spatial datasets
• 3D plotting made simple and built for large/complex data geometries

PyVista (formerly vtki) is a helper module for the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) that takes a different approach on interfacing with VTK through NumPy and direct array access. This package provides a Pythonic, well-documented interface exposing VTK's powerful visualization backend to facilitate rapid prototyping, analysis, and visual integration of spatially referenced datasets.

This module can be used for scientific plotting for presentations and research papers as well as a supporting module for other mesh 3D rendering dependent Python modules; see Connections for a list of projects that leverage PyVista.

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Highlights

Head over to the Quick Examples page in the docs to explore our gallery of examples showcasing what PyVista can do! Want to test-drive PyVista? All of the examples from the gallery are live on MyBinder for you to test drive without installing anything locally:

Overview of Features

• Extensive gallery of examples (see Quick Examples)
• Interactive plotting in Jupyter Notebooks (server-side rendering with ipyvtk_simple)
• Filtering/plotting tools built for interactivity (see Widgets)
• Direct access to mesh analysis and transformation routines (see Filters)
• Intuitive plotting routines with matplotlib similar syntax (see Plotting)
• Import meshes from many common formats (use pyvista.read()). Support for all formats handled by meshio is built-in!
• Export meshes as VTK, STL, OBJ, or PLY (mesh.save()) file types or any formats supported by meshio (pyvista.save_meshio())

Documentation

Refer to the documentation for detailed installation and usage details.

For general questions about the project, its applications, or about software usage, please create an issue in the pyvista/pyvista-support repository where the community can collectively address your questions. You are also welcome to join us on Slack or send one of the developers an email. The project support team can be reached at [email protected].

Installation

PyVista can be installed from PyPI using pip on Python >= 3.6:

pip install pyvista

You can also visit PyPi, Anaconda, or GitHub to download the source.

See the Installation for more details if the installation through pip doesn't work out.

Connections

PyVista is a powerful tool that researchers can harness to create compelling, integrated visualizations of large datasets in an intuitive, Pythonic manner. Here are a few open-source projects that leverage PyVista:

• itkwidgets: Interactive Jupyter widgets to visualize images, point sets, and meshes in 2D and 3D. Supports all PyVista mesh types.
• pyansys: Pythonic interface to ANSYS result, full, and archive files
• PVGeo: Python package of VTK-based algorithms to analyze geoscientific data and models. PyVista is used to make the inputs and outputs of PVGeo's algorithms more accessible.
• omfvista: 3D visualization for the Open Mining Format (omf). PyVista provides the foundation for this library's visualization.
• discretize: Discretization tools for finite volume and inverse problems. discretize provides toVTK methods that return PyVista versions of their data types for creating compelling visualizations.
• pymeshfix: Python/Cython wrapper of Marco Attene's wonderful, award-winning MeshFix software.
• tetgen: Python Interface to Hang Si's C++ TetGen Library

Authors

Please take a look at the contributors page and the active list of authors to learn more about the developers of PyVista.

Contributing

We absolutely welcome contributions and we hope that our Contributing Guide will facilitate your ability to make PyVista better. PyVista is mostly maintained on a volunteer basis and thus we need to foster a community that can support user questions and develop new features to make this software a useful tool for all users while encouraging every member of the commutinity to share their ideas. To learn more about contributing to PyVista, please see the Contributing Guide and our Code of Conduct.

Citing PyVista

There is a paper about PyVista!

If you are using PyVista in your scientific research, please help our scientific visibility by citing our work!

Sullivan et al., (2019). PyVista: 3D plotting and mesh analysis through a streamlined interface for the Visualization Toolkit (VTK). Journal of Open Source Software, 4(37), 1450, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01450

BibTex:

@article{sullivan2019pyvista,
  doi = {10.21105/joss.01450},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01450},
  year = {2019},
  month = {may},
  publisher = {The Open Journal},
  volume = {4},
  number = {37},
  pages = {1450},
  author = {C. Bane Sullivan and Alexander Kaszynski},
  title = {{PyVista}: 3D plotting and mesh analysis through a streamlined interface for the Visualization Toolkit ({VTK})},
  journal = {Journal of Open Source Software}
}