SVT

The scientific visualization toolbox (SVT) is a Python package that contains a collection of tools for creating static and interactive renderings and dashboards for scientific visualization purposes.

Installation

Prerequisites

• uv for dependency management.

• POV-Ray — SVT generates POV-Ray scene scripts and shells out to the povray binary to render them, so it must be installed separately and available on your PATH.

  • Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install povray
  • macOS: brew install povray
  • Windows: download an installer from the POV-Ray downloads page

  Any POV-Ray 3.6+ install works.

• FFmpeg — after rendering per-frame PNGs, SVT calls ffmpeg to stitch them into a video, so it also needs to be on your PATH.

  • Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install ffmpeg
  • macOS: brew install ffmpeg
  • Windows: download a build from gyan.dev or ffmpeg.org/download.html and add the bin folder to your PATH

  SVT encodes videos as ProRes 4444 (.mov, with an alpha channel via yuva444p10le) to preserve transparency for compositing. Standard FFmpeg builds from the sources above include prores_ks support out of the box; no extra build flags are needed.

Steps

git clone https://github.com/Ali-7800/SVT.git
cd svt
uv sync

This installs SVT and its dependencies into a local .venv managed by uv. Run any script or the test suite through uv run, e.g.:

uv run python my_scene.py

Usage

A minimal example: build a scene, add a camera and light, drop in a couple of primitives with different textures, and render it.

from svt import Scene, Sphere, Plane

scene = Scene()
scene.background.color = [0.02, 0.02, 0.05, 0]

camera_id = scene.add_camera(
    name="main",
    location=[0, 5, -14],
    angle=50,
    look_at=[0, 1, 0],
)
scene.add_light(location=[-8, 12, -10], color=[1, 1, 1])

ground = Plane("ground", normal=[0, 1, 0], distance=-1)
ground.color = [0.6, 0.6, 0.6]
scene.append(ground)

sphere = Sphere("sphere", position=[0, 1, 0], radius=1)
sphere.color = [0.2, 0.6, 0.9]
sphere.finish.metallic = True
sphere.finish.reflection = 0.4
scene.append(sphere)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    scene.render_frames(
        output_images_directory="",
        times=[0],
        name="Frame",
    )

Available objects

• Primitives: Sphere, Cylinder, Cone, Plane, SphereSweep, Mesh
• Stage: Scene (cameras, lights, and the objects to render)

Every object supports a shared texture/finish API:

• color, transmit — base pigment
• image_map — UV/planar/spherical/cylindrical/torus image textures
• bump_map — normal mapping
• finish — ambient, diffuse, specular, roughness, phong, metallic, reflection, iridescence, and related parameters

Most numeric attributes accept either a static value or a time-varying callable, so scenes can be animated across frames.

License

TBD.