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# Tutorial examples to learn Mayavi

Section summary

In this section, we give a few detailed examples of how you can use the Mayavi application to tour some of its features.

This section is mainly interested with the Mayavi application, but it is a good introduction to the ideas behind using Mayavi as a library. However, if you are only interested in a quick start to use Mayavi as a simple, Matlab-like, plotting library, you can jump directly to the mlab: scripting for 3D plotting section, and come back later for a deeper understanding.

To get acquainted with mayavi you may start up the Mayavi2 application, `mayavi2` in the command line, like so:

    $ mayavi2

On Windows you can double click on the installed `mayavi2.exe` executable (usually in the `Python2X\Scripts` directory), or use the start menu entry, if you installed python(x,y) or EPD.

Once Mayavi starts, you may resize the various panes of the user interface to get a comfortable layout. These settings will become the default “perspective” of the mayavi application. More details on the UI are available in the General layout of UI section.

Before proceeding on the quick tour, it can be useful to locate some data to experiment with. Two of the examples below make use of data shipped with the mayavi sources ship. These may be found in the `examples/data` directory inside the root of the mayavi source tree. If these are not installed, the sources may be downloaded from here: http://code.enthought.com/enstaller/eggs/source/

Examples:

- Parametric surfaces: a simple introduction to visualization
- Loading scalar data: the `heart.vtk` example
- Visualizing rich datasets: the `fire_ug.vtu` example
- Using Mayavi with scipy
- Exploring a vector field

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