Mayavi Python easy install
Mayavi may be thought of as a Python layer atop VTK, making common 3-D data plotting tasks easy.
Mayavi is installed via pip
or conda
.
VTK, Traits, et al have
.whl binary wheel
wheels, which avoid the previously painful build process.
Install
Because of the large number of prereq packages for Mayavi, we strongly urge installing Mayavi in a seperate virtualenv or Conda environment.
Note: we specify Python 3.7 as that’s currently the newest version VTK has a conda package for.
conda create -n vis3d python==3.7
conda activate vis3d
conda install mayavi
Plot 3-D data
Mayavi makes high quality manipulable volume plots.
Create a file scalar_field.py
with the content
from mayavi import mlab
import numpy as np
x, y, z = np.mgrid[-10:10:20j, -10:10:20j, -10:10:20j]
s = np.sin(x*y*z)/(x*y*z)
scf = mlab.pipeline.scalar_field(x,y,z,s)
mlab.pipeline.volume(scf)
mlab.show()
Test programs for Mayavi. Mayavi should not error with
ImportError: Could not import backend for traits
Notes
There may be spurious errors during install such as:
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘vtk’
but Mayavi usually works anyway.
Mayavi plots not displaying
On Linux or Windows Subsystem for Linux an X11 server or Wayland server is necessary.