PVGeo: an open-source Python package for geoscientific visualization in VTK and ParaView
Bane Sullivan, Whitney Trainor‐Guitton · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2019
PVGeo is an open-source Python package for geoscientific visualization and analysis, harnessing an already powerful software platform: the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and its front-end application, ParaView.The VTK software platform is well-maintained, contains an expansive set of native functionality, and provides a robust foundation for scientific visualization, yet the development of tools compatible with geoscience data and models has been limited.As a software extension package to VTK and ParaView, PVGeo addresses the lack of geoscientific compatibility by creating a framework for geovisualization.PVGeo aims to make the process of importing geoscience data into VTK-based software fluid and straightforward for users while providing a framework for new features that avoids the typical, ambitious programming endeavor of building VTK software plugins.We have developed this code library, PVGeo, to link geoscientific data and models with VTK-based 3D rendering environments like ParaView: an open-source platform built on top of VTK (Ayachit, 2015).Since VTK is an established and robust visualization platform, it provides a rich toolbox of features common for visualization and spatial analysis across disciplines (Schroeder, Lorensen, & Martin, 2006).Examples of standard features include volume rendering, glyphing, subsetting, K-Means clustering, volume interpolation, iso-contouring, and Virtual Reality (Ayachit, 2015;Schroeder et al., 2006).By linking geoscience to VTK and ParaView, geoscientists can harness all of the native tools within ParaView, and other VTK powered libraries like ParaViewWeb (Jourdain, Ayachit, & Geveci, 2010), VTK.js (Kitware, Inc., 2019), and PyVista (Sullivan & Kaszynski, 2019) or extend that data into new domains like Virtual Reality, as outlined in Figure 1.PVGeo couples geoscientific information to software libraries at the forefront of scientific visualization, which enables scientists to cost-effectively and reproducibly communicate their findings.