Comments on: 3D Plotting in Python with matplotlib mplot3d

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:27:13 +0000

I've used Mayavi and found it to be very nice as an integrated environment, but I ended up using the underpinning library, TVTK, instead. mplot3d is great for prepared visualizations of relatively simply data, but for exploratory viz (like in simulations) it isn't necessarily suitable. But by dropping down to TVTK, much more control over the data sources and mechanisms are available -- including things like hierarchical (i.e., AMR) data sources. Plus, all the awesome widgets in Mayavi2, like for colormaps and labels, are still available! As for the installation, I've had really good luck installing VTK on its own, installing the ETSProjectTools and using the "ets co" "ets develop" commands to conduct a source installation, as mentioned on the Enthought website. This keeps most of the setuptools (forked as distribute) toolchain out of the way. For deploying software on heterogeneous machines without admin privs, fully-isolated source installations were the only solution we could come up with for astro-viz packages, and most of the binary eggs (even things like mercurial!) were problematic.

By: Michael Fitzgerald

Michael Fitzgerald — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 09:45:17 +0000

I didn’t encounter problems installing mayavi using easy_install, which also lets one use a custom installation prefix (e.g. easy_install-2.6 –prefix=$home Mayavi). I haven’t yet tried mplot3d — thanks for the tip.

By: Casey Law

Casey Law — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:09:03 +0000

Thanks for the post! I also struggled with Mayavi installation and eventually gave up on my hopes for 3d python plots. Now I’ve reproduced a few of the demos with matplotlib 0.99.

So glad I am subscribing to this blog!