Python & OpenGL for Scientific Visualization

by Nicolas P. Rougier

Python and OpenGL have a long but complicated story. It used to be really easy to program something using the fixed-pipeline and libraries such as Pyglet but things have became more difficult with the introduction of the dynamic graphic pipeline in 2004. The goal of this book is to reconcile Python programmers with OpenGL, providing both an introduction to modern OpenGL and a set of basic and advanced techniques in order to achieve both fast, scalable & beautiful scientific visualizations. The book uses the GLES 2.0 API which is the most simple API for accessing the programmable graphic pipeline. It does not cover up-to-date OpenGL techniques but it is sufficient to achieve great visualisation. In fact, modern OpenGL allows to control pretty much everything in the pipeline and the goal of this book is to explain several techniques dedicated to scientific visualisation such as isolines, markers, colormaps, arbitrary transformations but there are actually many more techniques to be discovered and explained in this open-access book. And of course, everything will be fast and beautiful.

ebook

Published October 1, 2018