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?

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