Quiltwright

Holographic output for scientific visualization.

Eric G. Suchanek, PhD -- Flux-Frontiers

Quiltwright is the last stage of a scientific rendering pipeline -- any pipeline that ends in a scene. It takes what you already have -- a PyVista or VTK scene built in memory, a ParaView session saved as a .pvsm, a Blender file or an exported mesh, or a .pov file written thirty years ago by someone who is no longer around to explain it -- and puts it on holographic hardware in glasses-free depth. Nothing is rewritten to get there: your scene file is never modified, the off-axis camera is supplied per view, and each scene is rendered by the renderer it already belongs to. Where that renderer is Blender's Cycles, the views are path-traced on the GPU's ray-tracing cores if the hardware has them; where it is ParaView, the sweep runs inside ParaView's own pvpython, so the pipeline, color maps and transfer functions you built come across intact.

It is used that way by WaveRider for geometric ML manifolds and by pypdb2pov for molecular structures, but neither is a prerequisite. If you can render it, you can hang it in the air.

A career in structural biophysics, arranged as exhibits: B-DNA and Z-DNA under bell jars, Ras and my original DNA Under Glass on the walls. The molecular models were generated by pdb2pov in 1997; the room dates to 1995. Quiltwright ray-traces it into a 48-view light-field quilt for Looking Glass light-field panels, or into 2-D video for Hololuminescent displays. About the image

Where to start

Installation	Package extras, POV-Ray, ffmpeg, Bridge, pypdb2pov
Usage recipes	PyVista, POV-Ray, Cycles, ParaView, casting to Bridge, printer sweeps, depth budget
The shell workflow	Every make target, the parallelism model, run reports, and what each CLI command is for
CLI reference	Every quiltwright command and flag

Backends

PyVista / VTK	Light-field output, Bridge/Studio setup, device presets, view sweeps for hologram printers
POV-Ray	Off-axis camera derivation, depth budget, sweep clearance, a worked case study
Blender Cycles	Hardware ray tracing (Metal/OptiX/HIP), mesh and .blend scenes, one process per sweep
ParaView	A saved .pvsm session swept in place by pvpython, pipeline and color maps intact
Mesh import	Any 3D object file (glTF/GLB, OBJ, FBX, USD, ...) to a quilt in one command
Writing scenes with povgen	Analytic primitives, so a scene composed in Python can be ray-traced rather than rasterized
The archive-scene workflow	Taking an archive scene from "won't parse" to a quilt that fuses, step by step
Molecular scenes	Rendering molecular structures as holograms with pypdb2pov
Hololuminescent Displays	Ordinary 2-D video rather than quilts

Scene sources

PyVista example datasets	Topography, the Allen mouse brain atlas, other strong-depth candidates
The Virtual Brain	Cortical surfaces, connectomes, parcellations, downloaded on demand

See also the gallery of every rendered scene, and the architecture behind the package layout.

The API reference is generated from the package's own docstrings.

Source

Quiltwright is BSD-3-Clause and lives at github.com/Flux-Frontiers/quiltwright.