A particle visualization system.
ParView creates high-quality, 3D visualizations and movies of spheres and other particles, as a visual aid to help in simple physical simulations.
Built in Rust, using GLFW through kiss3d, ParView is made to be fast, responsive, and very customizable.
There are many programs out there for viewing simulations — VMD, PyMol, etc. However, most of these are specifically for viewing molecules, and if your simulations don't particularly conform to this model, they can be difficult to view.
Parview allows fine-grained control over particle size, shape, and coloring, while using simple-to-create formats like toml and json for storing particle coordinates, viewer preferences, and color palettes.
Here is an example of a packing of spherocylinders being created:
Note: ParView outputs high-quality mpeg videos (created with ffmpeg); some noticeable quality was lost as part of the transition from mpeg to gif.
The conversion from .mpg to .gif was accomplished with this command:
ffmpeg -i spherocylinders.mpg -r 12 -vf scale=600:-1:flags=lanczos frames/spherocylinders%04d.png
convert -delay 0.08333333 -layers removeDups -layers OptimizePlus -loop 0 frames/*.png -dither None exampledata/spherocylinders.gifColor palettes and configuration files are in TOML format, with specific possibilities demonstrated in the exampleconfigs folder.
Data on particle positions and sizes are loaded from either a plain text JSON file, or gzipped JSON file. A minimal example of this is in exampleconfigs/minimal.json.
Note that particles are "named" with a list of strings. This is to allow for a hierarchy of naming. For example, if you had a protein, you might want the list of names to be [residue_number, residue_type, element, atom_name], so that the user could easily switch between coloring by residue, coloring by residue type, coloring by atom element, etc.
There are two binaries produced by this library: parviewer and pvrecord. parviewer is for immediate viewing of particle trajectories, and pvrecord produces a .mpeg file.
The binary parviewer is for simple viewing; it will show you the particle trajectories, and you can click and drag to rotate the image, or use the keybindings below.
| Key | Function |
|---|---|
| Q | Quit |
| Space | Pause playback |
Comma, , |
Slow down playback |
Period, , |
Speed up playback |
| S | Save image (filename will be frame0001.png for frame 1) |
| F | Reverse playback direction |
| Up | Rotate the cube to a 45° angle, 30° from the plane |
| Down | Rotate the cube to look directly along the z-axis |
| 1-9 | Choose which parts of a particle name are used for coloring |
| 0 | Eliminate all color by name |
Also note that clicking and dragging will rotate the view, and scrolling with the mouse will alter the zoom.
The pvrecord binary is for producing movies. Run pvrecord --help for details. Note that only the Q button works; other keybindings are disabled, in order to prevent accidental clicks or button presses from modifying the video.
To install, you will need:
- NASM, available in most package managers
This library also depends on a large number of other Rust crates, but cargo will handle all that for you by default.
To compile everything, run these commands:
git clone https://github.com/wackywendell/parview.git
cd parview
cargo build --releaseThe binaries will then be in the parview/target/release folder.