User Guide

This section details the general usage of PyVista for users who may or may not have used VTK in the past, but are looking to leverage it in a Pythonic manner for 3D plotting. See the table of contents below or the in the side panel for the individual sections demonstrating the key concepts of PyVista.

Simple Interactive Example

This basic example demonstrates three key features of PyVista:

• Simple numpy and matplotlib like interface

• Variety of built-in examples

• Intuitive plotting with keyword arguments.

Here, we download the Stanford dragon mesh, color it according to height, and plot it using a web-viewer. This same example will run identically locally.

>>> from pyvista import examples
>>> mesh = examples.download_dragon()
>>> mesh['scalars'] = mesh.points[:, 1]
>>> mesh.plot(cpos='xy', cmap='plasma')

Static Scene

Interactive Scene

Note

This example (and many others) is interactive.

With just a few lines of code we downloaded a sample mesh from the web, added scalars to it based on the points of the mesh, and plotted it while controlling the orientation, color, and data presented in the visualization.

The following sections explain the details of the how and why of PyVista’s interface.

User Guide Contents

• What is a Mesh?
  • What is a Point?
  • What is a Cell?
  • What are Attributes?
  • Assigning Scalars to a Mesh
• Basic API Usage
  • Wrapping a VTK Data Object
  • Reading a VTK File
  • Accessing the Wrapped Data Object
  • Plotting
  • Exporting
• PyVista Data Model
  • The PyVista DataSet
  • Points and Arrays Within PyVista
  • Geometry and Mesh Connectivity/Topology Within PyVista
  • Data Arrays
• Transitioning from VTK to PyVista
  • PointSet Construction
  • Object Representation
  • Tradeoffs
• Plotting Themes
  • Creating A Custom Theme
  • Theme API
• Jupyter Notebook Plotting
  • Supported Modules
  • Usage with PyVista
• Optional Features
  • Vectorised Ray Tracing
  • Project to Finite Plane

Videos

Here are some videos that you can watch to learn PyVista:

• PyConJP2020 talk “How to plot unstructured mesh file on Jupyter Notebook” (15 minutes):

  • Video

  • Material

• Software Underground Tutorial

  • Tutorial: PyVista

If there is any material that we can add, please open an issue .