3D plotting library / OpenGL

[Fernando Perez]

Andrew Dalke wrote:

> I've been looking for a decent 3D plotting library with support
> for user selection that works under OpenGl, preferable with wxPython.
> 
> For this first project I need to do a 3D scatter plot with
> different colors and glyphs (spheres, crosses, etc.) for the points.
> The axes will be labeled and I would like both mouseover and
> mouse click selection.  There will be at most 2,000 points.
> 
> I've found several for making graphs, like DISLIN, but most
> don't offer interactivity.  I spent many hours trying to get
> VTK working on my Mac under both native and X GUI toolkits,
> without success.  SciGraphica seems close, but it has the
> Gtk requirement.

I'd seriously recommend you look at VTK again.  I've done exactly what you are
describing with Mayavi:

http://amath.colorado.edu/faculty/fperez/faults/

Disregard the timing info, it's old and with some fixes to MayaVi I wrote
(available in current CVS), and a tweaked glyphs user module (which I can send
you if you want it), the speed is extremely fast even for fairly large
datasets.

Mayavi is finkable, though after using fink to pull it in (so you get vtk and
friends) you might want to update to CVS to get some of the recent fixes which
I think are not yet on the fink version.

Cheers,

f