This library allows to easily plot VTK files, for example, from FEniCS or any other software, in two dimensions using Matplotlib. The VTK file can be based on an Unstructured or Structured grid, binary or XML.

By default, the class in this library extracts the data from a slice of the system, in the x-y plane, thus a range of z values must be specified.

The data extracted from the VTK file is interpolated using SciPy but an option to use natgrid is also available.

Currently, there are two functions to plot the data: one to plot a colormap of the sliced data with an optional quiver plot on top and one to make a quiver plot of the vector field.

The interpolation is performed in a square grid whose dimensions and spacing can be tuned. A complete tutorial with most of the capabilities of this library can be found in the plot_vtk_matplotlib_tutorial.ipynb IPython notebook. This library is mainly oriented to be used with IPython notebooks since we do not state matplotlib.pyplot.show() when generating the graphs, but it can be specified after the library function calls.

Clone the repository, cd into the new directory and as a root user, do

pip install .

This will add plot_vtk_matplotlib to the Python libraries.

Alternatively, use

sudo pip install git+https://github.com/fangohr/plot_vtk_matplotlib.git

The library needs matplotlib, scipy and vtk to work. It is recommended to install the latest versions using pip.

A BSD license statement can be found in the license.txt file.

David Cortes, Hans Fangohr, University of Southampton (2015)