Mayavi — The Complete Guide: 3D Scientific Visualisation in Python
Mayavi is an open-source (BSD) tool for interactive 3D visualisation of scientific data, built on VTK and developed by Enthought. You can open it as an application with a graphical interface, or use it as a library inside a Python script through the mlab module — much like familiar plotting commands, but in 3D.
Mayavi
Enthought
3D visualisation of scientific data in Python — scalar, vector and tensor fields, as an application and as a library.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Iso-surfaces — a constant value of pressure, temperature or stress shown through a volume.
- Vectors and streamlines — velocity fields from CFD results.
- Cut planes — slices through the volume coloured by value.
- Tensor fields — displaying tensors such as stresses.
- Scripting with mlab — images and animations generated automatically from code.
Who it suits and what to know
Engineers, researchers and students who already compute in Python and want a 3D view without leaving the script. Installation is the weak point: it depends on VTK and a GUI toolkit such as PyQt, PySide or wxPython, and sometimes requires matching versions. For very large data sets or purely interactive work, ParaView is the better fit.
Related tools
For visualising large simulation data in a full interface — ParaView or VisIt. For the working environment itself — Python with JupyterLab.
ParaView
Kitware / Sandia / Los Alamos
Large-scale simulation post-processing — slices, streamlines and animation.
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VisIt — Simulation Results Visualization
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Scientific visualization tool for large datasets from FEA and CFD simulations.
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Python
Python Software Foundation
The language behind most modern engineering computation, and its full ecosystem.
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JupyterLab
Project Jupyter
Interactive computing notebooks — code, results, plots and explanations in one shareable document.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Mayavi is a convenient way to add serious 3D graphics to a Python workflow. It is completely free, commercial use included — it just takes some patience to install.