The 3D Update

[AngelFP]

After more than a year with no meaningful updates, a new major version of VisualPIC is finally ready to go! This update focuses mainly on improvements to the 3D visualizer, which is now much more stable and has gained quite a few new features. Another major change is the addition of support for HiPACE and openPMD data (thanks to Remi), although still it's early stages.

An overview of the changes in this new version can be seen below:

New logo

New logo with more minimalist design and transparency, which is better optimized for overlaying on top of graphs and 3D renders.

Improvements to the 3D visualizer

The main improvements can be summarized as follows:

• Added several opacity profile presets and colormaps (obtained from matplotlib).
• Opacity profiles and colormaps can be manually edited, saved and imported from files.
• Added option to automatically calculate optimized opacity profiles for better visualization.
• The graphs for editing opacity and colormaps now include axis labels and range, as well as a background histogram of the data.
• Option to change background color of render (black or white).
• 3D axes are now displayed on the render (can be disabled).
• VisualPIC logo is visible by default.
• Added option to display colorbars of the fields.
• Added brightness and contrast controls for better-looking renders.
• Quality of the render can be manually changed.
• Several bug fixes and stability improvements.
• UI changes.

An overview of the new opacity and colormap editing controls can be seen in the following image:

New data readers

Added compatibility with additional PIC codes:

• HiPACE data is now supported, although further testing is required.
• Added preliminary openPMD support based on openPMD-viewer, meaning that VisualPIC should now be able to read data from any PIC code implementing the openPMD standard. The support is currently limited only to 2d and 3d fields in cartesian coordinates as well as particle data. Further work is also needed in order to properly read the units of the data.

New dark theme

An optional dark theme, currently in testing, has been added. The theme is disabled by default but can be activated by setting dark_theme = True in the __main__.py file.

Other changes

• Added new datasets.
• Custom matplotlib and VTK files are no longer needed. Instead, they are now implemented directly in the VisualPIC code.
• Updated installation instructions.
• The matplotlib navigation toolbar is now a custom implementation, allowing for future changes in appearance and functionality.
• Other bug fixes and UI changes.
• Removed unnecesary files and directories from repository.
• Improvements to code style and readability. The new classes and some parts of the code are now more "pythonic" and follow the standards more closely, but lots of work is still required to rewrite older code.

[ax3l]

congrats on the new release, this looks awesome! :rocket: :sparkles: