PyVista: 3D plotting and mesh analysis through a streamlined interface for the Visualization Toolkit (VTK)

There are several options for 3D visualization in Python, a few notable projects include Matplotlib (Hunter, 2007), Mayavi (Ramachandran & Varoquaux, 2011), the yt Project (Turk et al., 2010), and the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) (Schroeder, Lorensen, & Martin, 2006). However, few open-source packages are capable of handling large, spatiallyreferenced datasets and some are powerful yet have inherently complex application programming interfaces (APIs), which might create a barrier to entry for new users. Notably, VTK is a powerful scientific visualization software library, and with Python bindings, it combines the speed of C++ with the rapid prototyping of Python. Despite this, VTK code programmed in Python using the base VTK Python package is unnecessarily complicated as its API binds existing C++ calls. The PyVista Python package provides a concise, well-documented interface exposing VTK’s powerful visualization backend; enabling researchers to rapidly explore large datasets, communicate their spatial findings, and facilitate reproducibility. PyVista further seeks to simplify standard mesh creation and plotting routines without compromising on the speed of the C++ VTK backend.