2011/6/7 Jan Marten Simons

I noticed cctbx has some custom wx based graphic windows to display various specialized plots and visualisations. I'm interested in generating some simple 3d xyz plots like in [1]. Is functionality for this included in cctbx or should I rather use another python based plotter for this?

CCTBX itself doesn't do this - we're using a third-party library called matplotlib: http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/ Our modules simply encapsulate the plots in wxPython windows and handle some of the repetitive tasks. These are useful for building custom apps (they're used extensively in the GUI for PHENIX), but matplotlib also has a much simpler API that can be used interactively; I think it's patterned after matlab. The website has some good examples (with code) of 3D plots. My main complaint is that the 3D rendering is much too slow to be useful interactively (i.e. rotating with the mouse, etc.) - they're obviously not using OpenGL. (The benefit of this is that you can still run it offline and save to an image/PS/PDF file.) -Nat