[yt-dev] Particle-Only Plots

[Nathan Goldbaum]

Hi Andrew,

This is a really great idea and something that should be a big usability
win as more and more people use yt with particle datasets.  I have several
comments, questions, and suggestions but overall an emphatic +1 on this
eventually making its way into yt.

Is ParticlePlot a subclass of PlotContainer?  Does it make sense to do
that? For all the other plotting classes there is a sense of a list of
fields to loop over and store plots for per-object. Your plotting class
could accept a list of x and y fields (does it?) so I guess you could store
all permutations of x and y field combinations and make a plot for each
one, although I'm not sure if that makes sense.

Should we perhaps instead have a class that splats particle positions onto
spatial axes and another that does the same for arbitrary combinations of
fields like ProfilePlot and PhasePlot?  One issue with your second example
is that the aspect ratio isn't equal for both axes, which is presumably why
your spherical distribution of particles appears a bit squashed.  It would
be straightforward to handle this if we know the x and y axes are spatial,
less so if the plotting class has to handle axes with generic dimensions.

I'd prefer it if we could keep the plotting code as unified as possible.
 Optimally, this means that individual plots should subclass PlotMPL and
ParticlePlot would subclass PlotContainer. Doing so should reduce code
duplication and also ease maintainability going forward.  That said, I
totally understand that you have the code written already and don't want to
force you to rewrite a bunch of stuff you've alrady written.  One bonus of
using the plotting infrastructure that's in yt right now is that you should
be able to wire up the PlotWindow plot callbacks, at least for plots that
have spatial fields along both axes.

It might be useful to hash this out in a YTEP.

Hope that's not too much feedback - if you can't tell i'm excited about
this!

-Nathan


On Wed, Aug 27, 2014 at 11:26 PM, Andrew Myers <atmyers2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> A while back, Jeremy Ritter asked the yt-users list if yt could produce a
> particle plot like that obtained through annotate_particles(), but without
> loading any mesh data. The answer was "no", but that it isn't too hard to
> use matplotlib directly. Personally, this is a visualization task that I do
> all the time, and I think it would be useful to make this type of plot a
> one-liner in yt - provided it handles units and labels and such
> automatically like any other yt plot.
>
> I've added this feature in my fork of yt. The interface is the same as for
> any other yt plots, and the standard plot modification mechanisms should
> work. Examples are here
> <http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/atmyers/f8616c9ed5a9d2b027e8> and here
> <http://nbviewer.ipython.org/gist/atmyers/8d979d990268f48c9688>.
>
> If there is interest in having this in mainline yt I'll write some docs
> and issue a pull request.
>
> -Andrew
>
>
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