option to use PyVista for 3D plotting?

[banesullivan]

I'm thinking about adding changes to discretize that would leverage PyVista for 3D plotting if it is available. For example, I'm thinking about adding a condition for mesh.plotGrid that would call .to_vtk() and set up a PyVista figure rather than a Matplotlib figure:

Here's a current implementation (from this example):

That same mesh can be plotted with PyVista:

What are folks thoughts on this?

[prisae]

I would be all in for this! Thumbs up from me.

[lheagy]

👍 from me on this @banesullivan!! This would be great :)

[lheagy]

In terms of implementation, I think it would be nice to have a plotting_backend property (or similar) that can be set to pyvista, matplotlib (and potentially others), so that the user can switch between in the case that they want a matplotlib figure even if they have pyvista available. For the default though, 👍 on having pyvista be the default if available.

[fourndo]

Sounds great to able to spin it around.
I personally never use this call cause it's not very useful to look at a spaghetti of lines.
I would prefer seeing maybe three orthogonal sections in the middle?
Just a thought

[banesullivan]

Thanks for the input everybody!

I would prefer seeing maybe three orthogonal sections in the middle?

That's an excellent idea - perhaps something like PyVista's .slice_orthogonal method (or the IPython slicer tool) that would perform the slicing and set up a render window?

[thast]

@micmitch experimented a lot on 3D visualization. Maybe worth to get his inputs too.

[RichardScottOZ]

I would like to have it, anyway

[dccowan]

We did something similar in SimPEG recently with plotly. If the user has pyvista, they would have access to functionality that would call pyvista. If they don't have the package, no worries.

[banesullivan]

I certainly dropped the ball on this one.

It should be fairly low-hanging fruit to implement this.

[RichardScottOZ]

Might be a good Transform-2021 thing?

[domfournier]

Well that's exactly right @RichardScottOZ . My thought was to communicate through subsurface objects.