Anyone using 3D visualization (with PyVista)?

[banesullivan]

Not too long ago, I posted about a 3D visualization accessor for Xarray using PyVista:

Introducing pyvista-xarray for 3D visualization

I’ve recently been working on pyvista-xarray to create a DataArray accessor that builds a direct line of interoperability between xarray and VTK/PyVista for 3D visualization. This package is still in its early stages and I’d love to solicit as much feedback as possible from the xarray community about the types of data and ways in which you all would like to see this package improve to address 3D visualization needs. Additionally, this package provides a DataSet IO backend for reading VTK files…

Code here

GitHub - pyvista/pyvista-xarray: xarray DataArray accessors for PyVista

Some animations here:

Animated plots exported as gifs? · pyvista/pyvista-xarray · Discussion #49

Since then, PyVista has seen major improvements to the visualization capabilities in Jupyter and the web. See:

PyVista + Trame = Jupyter 3D Visualization

Soliciting Feedback

I’m curious if anyone here is using PyVista and/or pyvista-xarray? If so, I’d love to gather feedback (good or bad) about these tools and how you use (or want to use) these. And if not using these tools directly, I’m also curious to gather insights about broader 3D visualization challenges in the Pangeo ecosystem.

[RichardScottOZ]

PyVista quite a lot - pyvista-xarray I would have used more when I made a bunch of stuff a while back - but likely will going forwards.

[josephko91]

Hi @banesullivan. I have been using PyVista for creating 3d meshes of ice crystals, but I’m also interested in using PyVista with geospatial data (i.e., netcdf model output). One direct example that comes to mind is visualizing a cloud forming from an LES simulation. I saw the pyvista-xarray accessor that you created, but I’m wondering if it would be possible to directly integrate xarray access into PyVista instead of requiring a whole separate python package? That would be incredibly useful.

[banesullivan]

@josephko91

I’m wondering if it would be possible to directly integrate xarray access into PyVista instead of requiring a whole separate python package

Unfortunately, I don’t think so… We’ve built the PyVista ecosystem in a way where this sort of feature development and more specific usage should be isolated as a separate package.

If you’re finding the additional package to be burdensome, I’d love to capture what pain points you have as I worked to try to alleviate much of this for how I like to use xarray via the accessor mechanism. I recommend following up in an issue: Issues · pyvista/pyvista-xarray · GitHub

[kehinson]

Hi @josephko91. Not sure if you’re familiar with the GeoVista package, but maybe it could also be useful for PyVista like representations of geospatial data? Talked to the developer about it at SciPy this past summer and it worked well for me when I was messing around with xarray and visualizing some NetCDF model outputs.

[josephko91]

Thanks for the recommendation @kehinson! I haven’t used it yet, but it’s been on my radar!