Introduction to Scientific Visualization with Python

This is the repository for the PyCon Colombia 2019 tutorial on Scientific visualization.

The previous animation presents a visualization for the heat transfer in a plate with fixed temperature in the borders set to zero degrees and an initial temperature distribution following a smiley shape. If we wait long enough the solution should converge to a stationary state of zero degrees over the whole domain. The animation can be reproduced running the example provided in ./code/heat_iteration.py, for example

python heat_iteration.py

Contents

1. Installation
2. Optional installation
3. Checking the installation

Installation Instructions

We strongly encourage you to use conda to install the required packages for this tutorial. There are non-Python dependencies required that make manual installation or installing with pip very involved.

Note also that this tutorial is written for Python 3.6. No guarantees of any kind are made that it will be compatible with Python 2.

Create a conda environment using the file environment.yml in the root of the repository using

conda env create -f environment.yml

for Windows use

conda env create -f environment_win.yml

instead.

This will create a conda environment named scivistutorial with all of the required packages.

You can activate the environment with

conda activate scivistutorial

To activate the X3D backend for Mayavi, that can be used for interactive visualization in the Jupyter notebook use the following:

jupyter nbextension install --py mayavi --user

Optional installation

ParaView

We would also discuss ParaView as a platform for visualization. The suggested installation method is to download the package for your particular operative system on the official websise.

vtki

vtki (previously known as VTKInterface) is a VTK helper module that takes a different approach on interfacing with VTK through NumPy and direct array access.

To install vtki use

pip install vtki

in your environment.

Checking the installation

After installation you can check if everything is installed

python check_install.py

To check if everything is working run the demos with

python demo.py

License

All code is under MIT license and media under Creative Commons Attribute.

The content of this repository is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, and the source code that accompany the content is licensed under the MIT license.