[SciPy-user] surface plotting

[Sebastian Haase]

On Nov 4, 2007 6:19 PM, Gael Varoquaux <gael.varoquaux at normalesup.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 04, 2007 at 11:53:01AM -0500, Joe Harrington wrote:
> > I'm in search of either Python or an open-source, standalone image
> > viewer that can visualize surface plots.  A surface plot is a rendering
> > of a 2D image as a 3D surface using the image values as the Z
> > coordinate.
>
> Mayavi2 can do this, and has a scripting interface that should be easy to
> use for what you want to do. You can have a look at
> https://svn.enthought.com/enthought/attachment/wiki/MayaVi/Sciy2007_mlab_slides.pdf?format=raw
> for instance.
>
> Hopefully you should find all the info you need to install mayavi2 on
> https://svn.enthought.com/enthought/wiki/MayaVi, if not just ask.
>
Hi  Gaël,
I'm following MayaVi for a long time.
And I'm looking forward to install the new (wx based version of)
MavaVi (mayavi2).

The page you referred to, however, lists the dependencies, which is
just daunting !!
VTK by itself is considered to be a difficult install... (you can't do
nothing about that).

But now, what is
TVTK ? (Does it depend on other parts of Enthough ?)
How do you get Traits, without having to get ALL the rest of Enthought ?
Last but not least, I'm not a big fan of setuptools: googling for it
turns up mostly scipy and some other projects - but no "official
endorsement" by python.org ! Some people warn that it might download
files and install them on your system without warning ....
In my particular case, I don't have system admin permissions, and it
seems to require (or at least, work best) when writing to the systems
site-packages folder.

Don't get me wrong: I'm not criticising, I'm very interested in most
of the above (especially Traits, BTW). So far I just could not manage
to start using any of them: neither on Linux (debian), nor on Windows.

Any help is very much appreciated.
-Sebastian Haase