Pyvisi - The Python Visualisation Interface

Introduction

Pyvisi is intended to be a generic, Python-language-based generic interface to many packages used in scientific visualisation. The idea is that the user writes one set of code to plot a set of data (say), and then can choose to use one of many "backends" or "renderer modules" to actually perform the task of visualising the data. For instance, one could use vtk to visualise certain kinds of three-dimensional data, but then for very high quality output, one might wish to use PovRay, or Renderman for the same data. With pyvisi, one would have to change one line of code (that specifying the underlying renderer for the visualisation) in order to use the relevant package. The interface then goes off and handles all of the messy internal details about dealing with that particular engine, leaving a consistent interface for the user. It is intended that the software will have a good overall structure, and API, in order that developers can reasonably easily add new backends to the interface, and these can just be imported as modules in the usual way in Python. The code is written in Python, and is therefore platform independent, however, it is likely that it will run better on Unix/Linux-based operating systems.

The current version of pyvisi is: 0.1-alpha-1, so it's still in its infancy, however, the gnuplot renderer module has several features and is quite usable.