A demo — mayavi 4.7.2 documentation

# A demo

To get you started, here is a pretty example showing a spherical harmonic as a surface:

    # Create the data.
    from numpy import pi, sin, cos, mgrid
    dphi, dtheta = pi/250.0, pi/250.0
    [phi,theta] = mgrid[0:pi+dphi*1.5:dphi,0:2*pi+dtheta*1.5:dtheta]
    m0 = 4; m1 = 3; m2 = 2; m3 = 3; m4 = 6; m5 = 2; m6 = 6; m7 = 4;
    r = sin(m0*phi)**m1 + cos(m2*phi)**m3 + sin(m4*theta)**m5 + cos(m6*theta)**m7
    x = r*sin(phi)*cos(theta)
    y = r*cos(phi)
    z = r*sin(phi)*sin(theta)

    # View it.
    from mayavi import mlab
    s = mlab.mesh(x, y, z)
    mlab.show()

Bulk of the code in the above example is to create the data. One line suffices to visualize it. This produces the following visualization:

The visualization is created by the single function `mesh()` in the above.

Several examples of this kind are provided with mlab (see test_contour3d, test_points3d, test_plot3d_anim etc.). The above demo is available as test_mesh. Under IPython these may be found by tab completing on mlab.test. You can also inspect the source in IPython via the handy mlab.test_contour3d??.