9. Useful tools

9.1. vtk

The homepage of the Visualisation ToolKit (vtk) is http://www.vtk.org. VTK provides is is an open source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing, and visualization. It also provides a file-format which is called ‘vtk’. A number of high-level user interfaces exist to visualise data provided in such vtk files. These include:

• MayaVi (http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/)
• VisIt (http://www.llnl.gov/visit/)
• ParaView (http://www.paraview.org/)

9.2. MayaVi

“MayaVi is a free, easy to use scientific data visualizer. It is written in Python and uses the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) for graphical rendering. MayaVi is free and distributed under the conditions of the BSD license. It is also cross platform and should run on any platform where both Python and VTK are available (which is almost any Unix, Mac OSX or Windows).” The MayaVi web page is http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/.

MayaVi has been used to generate many of the plots in this manual. Other tools are available for visualisation of vtk files (see vtk).

9.3. NumPy

Numerical Python (short numpy) is an extension library to Python that provides fast array operations and is designed for numerical work. This Python extension and documentation can be found at http://numpy.scipy.org/