modern approach to 3D visualization in python: discuss mayavi

Question

Is Mayavi the "modern" approach to 3D visualization scripting with python?

By modern, I mean a well informed person would choose to use Mayavi in 2015 for a variety of project requirements.

I first discovered it about a month ago, and it works well most of the time. It's also based in vtk which I think will be sticking around for awhile even if Mayavi doesn't.

A few things concern me, prompting me to make this post. Most of the activity including commits and posts in one of the main author's blogs seem to be 2010-2011. The users mailing list seems about dead, especially compared to say paraview. I also have had very poor luck getting questions answered here on StackOverflow.

So am I going about this the wrong way? Surely there are lots of python users and probably ~1% of those users need 3D visualization in some way. So where is everyone?

Lithium

Just a point of fact -- there are several hundred commits on mayavi github repo this year alone. – Propylite

A well informed person would choose to use mayavi, if it met the constraints of their project. There are other python tools such as vispy, visvis, matplotlib, and blender with different sets of features. – Tympanitis

Like many other software projects, regrettably mayavi does not have perfect documentation, although generally the documentation is quite good. The core functionality in mayavi was all written some years ago and Gael who was one of the core developers is now working on many other projects. But is mayavi going away? No, mayavi is not going away. – Tympanitis

Answer 1

Mayavi is alive and well. There has been a lot of activity on GitHub in the past months (https://github.com/enthought/mayavi), with a number of improvements, including updates to the latest VTK release. A new release it due soon.

Active alternatives are:

• For static plotting, matplotlib has got limited 3D plotting support: http://matplotlib.org/mpl_toolkits/mplot3d/
• ParaView, also based on VTK: http://www.paraview.org/ParaView3/Doc/Nightly/www/py-doc/
• VisLib and Glumpy are more recent project promise 3D visualization basef on OpenGL, but as far as I can tell they do not offer high-level 3D plotting just yet: http://vispy.org/, http://glumpy.github.io/index.html

Beiderbecke

Thanks pberkes. I've really like mayavi a lot, but I haven't had good luck with responses on a few issues. I hope the best for it and may even contribute somewhat in the future. – Lithium