[SciPy-user] surface plotting

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

Joe Harrington wrote:
> Well, I was hoping for a lighter solution, but I gave it a one-hour try.
> It didn't help that when I did the link to the user docs was broken
> (it's fixed now).  I got so far as installing mayavi2 and trying to
> figure it out without the doc, but ran out of time and wasn't able to
> figure out surface plotting my existing numpy array.  This was for use
> in a class and I decided that if I couldn't figure out how to do it in
> an hour I probably couldn't expect the students to do it at all.

Sorry about the mess with installation instructions etc.  I'm trying to 
get some help regarding this but I've been too busy otherwise to do much 
about it -- end of semester here.  I'm hoping to try and get something 
done about it over the next couple of weeks.

One of the easiest ways to get things installed without eggs right now 
is to first install the dependencies -- wxPython 2.6, python-vtk and 
numpy and then grab the tarballs here:

  http://code.enthought.com/downloads/source/ets2.6/

Untar them and build them each

  cd enthought.traits
  ./build.sh
  vi/emacs install.sh
  ./install.sh

for all the tarballs and you should have mayavi installed.  The script 
is broken in that it does not install the mayavi executable though -- 
need to fix that.

> It would be good to have a cookbook recipe about how to do surface
> plotting of a 2D numpy array in mayavi2.

mayavi.tools.mlab.surf should help here.

> When will mayavi2 be available as a deb file?  This looks like software
> that everyone should be able to get in the easiest fashion possible.

Ondrej Certik has been very helpful in making preliminary debs that we 
hope will soon get into debian.  You can find a older versions here:

  http://debian.certik.cz/

I sent Ondrej patches to fix some of the issues but don't see new 
versions yet.  Ondrej did say he was busy...


cheers,
prabhu