Behalf Of rob
I'm sorry I missed the original post, but the topic is important for me. I use the lightweight 3d volume renderer Animabob for most everything. The interface code is in all of the FDTD programs in my website. You just unwind a 3d array and scale it to +/- 128, turn it into chararacters, and you have the input file. I wish Animabob could somehow be turned into a Python package, as in Windows you need Cygwin to run it. I've tried other 3d packages like OpenDX, and they seem to be huge albatrosses.
It sound like you are trying to do something different than Magnus, but if what you are looking to scale floating or int data to byte size and apply some character mapping, numarray (or Numeric) should be able to do that very well. If that is all you want done, you might find either to be overkill though (if you already wrote a C extension to do so). Perry