[SciPy-user] 3d plotting question

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

>>>>> "Ryan" == Ryan Krauss <ryanfedora at comcast.net> writes:

    Ryan> Mayavi is pretty good but I think a bit more complicated
    Ryan> (http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/).  It can do some neat
    Ryan> animations.  But, it doesn't do as nice a job of generating
    Ryan> post-script files as gnuplot.
    Ryan>   I use mayavi for animations and gnuplot.py for print
    Ryan>   quality graphics.

Thanks.  Just a clarification.  It is not easy to generate vector
graphics output for complex visualizations.  However, if you build VTK
with GL2PS support it should be possible to generate true vector
PS/EPS/PDF output.  This works pretty well for simple visualizations.

IMHO, MayaVi is complicated primarily because you need to create your
data as per some format or another.  I am hoping to do something about
that in the next several months.

If you are willing to try and go over a few hoops installing the
enthought tool suite (no installers yet) you can get it from SVN and
try out the tools inside the TVTK package.  Some preliminary
information is available here (I'll update the pages over the next
week):

 http://www.enthought.com/enthought/wiki/TVTK

There are links to papers and presentations on TVTK there.  With
TVTK's mlab module (enthought.tvtk.tools.mlab) you can create simple
visualizations with pure Numeric/numarray data.  It is like
mayavi.tools.imv but a lot better with many more features.  I'll
announce this as soon as I have written a little more documentation on
installation of the enthought tool suite and a better TVTK web page.
Hopefully that will happen by next week.  If you are interested to
check it out right away, it might be a good idea to just read the
EuroPython2005 paper and presentation at the above site.

cheers,
prabhu