ANY3dView

Backend-neutral geometry, retained mesh arrays, camera, shading, clipping and selection contracts for scientific 3D viewers. The base package depends only on NumPy and imports without Tk, OpenGL, ANYtk3D or ANYgeometry.

ANY3dView contains the toolkit-independent core shared by rendering backends. It does not create windows or process native input during normal core imports. ANYtk3D provides the compatible Tk Canvas backend. An optional ModernGL backend embeds in the same Tk application without adding a second event loop.

Installation

pip install ANY3dView
pip install "ANY3dView[gpu]"       # ModernGL + tkinter-gl + Pillow capture
pip install "ANY3dView[geometry]"  # ANYgeometry adapter (Python 3.11+)

Interactive demo

Run the retained-array showcase from an installed package:

pip install "ANY3dView[gpu]"  # or install ANYtk3D for the software backend
any3dview-demo --backend auto

Or run it directly from a source checkout; the launcher also discovers a sibling ANYtk3D checkout for software fallback:

python C:\Github\ANY3dView\run_gui.py --backend auto

Use --backend gpu to require ModernGL or --backend software to require ANYtk3D. The demo includes scalar colouring, deformation animation, section clipping and backend/fallback diagnostics. Its Renderer selector can replace the live viewport with the GPU or Tk implementation without restarting the application.

Core API

from any3dview import Camera3D, Mesh, PickBinding, Point3D, SectionPlane

camera = Camera3D()
camera.set_target(Point3D(0, 0, 0))

plane = SectionPlane(normal=(1, 0, 0), offset=2.0)
assert plane.contains((3, 0, 0))
assert not plane.contains((1, 0, 0))

binding = PickBinding.one("element:42", "mesh.element")

Retained arrays

MeshArrays validates indexed NumPy data once. Compatible C-contiguous arrays are retained zero-copy and must stay immutable while registered; use owned_copy() when the producer cannot guarantee that lifetime.

import numpy as np
from any3dview import MeshArrays

mesh = MeshArrays(
    positions=np.asarray([[0, 0, 0], [1, 0, 0], [0, 1, 0]], np.float32),
    triangles=np.asarray([[0, 1, 2]], np.uint32),
    element_ids=np.asarray([42], np.uint64),
    element_scalars=np.asarray([180.0], np.float32),
)

handle = viewer.add_mesh_arrays(mesh)
handle.update_element_scalars(np.asarray([205.0], np.float32))
handle.set_selected_elements([0])

MeshHandle also supports positions, displacements, deformation scale, active masks, transforms, visibility, local chunk replacement and idempotent removal. Independent generation counters let backends update only changed buffers or display batches. Cross-thread producers can call viewer.submit_update(handle.update_displacements, immutable_array); the callback runs on the viewer's owning Tk thread.

Packed CSR owner tables avoid allocating owner objects per primitive. EntityHandle or PickOwner values are materialized only for selection hits. Incremental chunks can carry their own stable primitive ownership without changing the legacy handle.chunks view:

handle.add_chunk("crack-tip", local_mesh, owners=local_owner_table)
handle.replace_chunk("crack-tip", updated_mesh)  # preserves ownership
handle.set_chunk_ownership("crack-tip", replacement_owner_table)

handle.chunk_records and handle.chunk_ownership(id) expose the optional chunk-local table and resolver. Triangle, line and point CSR spans are checked against each chunk, so replacement cannot silently rebind local primitive indices. Passing None to set_chunk_ownership() explicitly clears the semantic mapping; a handle-level legacy tag remains a stable fallback binding.

Backends

from any3dview import create_viewer

viewer = create_viewer(parent, backend="auto")

backend="gpu" requires OpenGL 3.3 and raises GPUUnavailableError with diagnostics on failure. backend="software" lazily imports ANYtk3D. auto tries GPU first and falls back to software while retaining diagnostics.

The GPU path provides persistent indexed buffers, frustum culling, camera-relative float32 positions, derivative flat normals, instanced screen-space lines, point markers, node and element result fields, deformation, active masks, distinct compact selection/preselection masks for triangles, lines and points, sorted alpha, cached integer point picking, and visible/through rectangle and lasso queries. Rendering is demand-driven. Text, legends, rulers and interaction overlays use a cached Pillow-generated OpenGL atlas rather than child Tk label widgets. It also implements the established ANYtk3D scene surface (add_faces, lines, markers, text, shape builders, camera presets, legends, highlighting, animation and image capture), so existing scenes can be populated without a renderer-specific branch. Backend-specific pixels and Tk Canvas item IDs are not part of that portable contract.

tkinter-gl 1.1 has no OpenGL 3.3 profile token. On Windows, ANY3dView prefers its OpenGL 4.1 core profile because recent NVIDIA drivers can terminate a process inside the driver when TkGL and ModernGL share a legacy compatibility context. Set ANY3DVIEW_GL_PROFILE=legacy before creating the viewer only when using Windows hardware limited to OpenGL 3.3/4.0. ModernGL remains the final version gate, and unsupported contexts fail with an actionable diagnostic.

ViewerBackend, ViewerCapabilities, Pick and ViewerState describe the shared integration boundary. Applications can switch renderers transactionally by populating a candidate and copying the view policy:

candidate = create_viewer(parent, backend="gpu")
populate_scene(candidate)
candidate.apply_view_state(current.export_view_state())
candidate.pack(fill="both", expand=True)
current.destroy()

Both bundled backends expose backend_name, event_widget, viewport_size, project_point(s), screen_ray() and unproject_to_plane(). These replace direct access to Tk canvas dimensions or private projection methods.

LLM-safe viewer commands

ANY3dView 0.5.2 exposes a vendor-neutral JSON Schema 2020-12 command manifest. It contains only JSON-safe camera, display, section, semantic selection, visibility, observation, and undo/redo operations; it accepts no callbacks, expressions, or executable objects.

from any3dview import ViewerCommand, ViewerCommandController

controller = ViewerCommandController(viewer, entity_exists=model.contains_ref)
result = controller.execute(ViewerCommand(
    "viewer.visibility.isolate",
    {"entities": [{
        "source": "model", "model_id": str(model.uuid),
        "kind": "face", "key": 42,
    }]},
))
assert result.status == "ok"

viewer_command_manifest() is suitable for native tool calling or a strictly validated JSON fallback and has no dependency on an LLM vendor. Hosts assign trusted queue priorities, may pause AI work during pointer gestures, and get a bounded 50-step transactional history. set_model_identity() clears history when an application model changes; revalidate() removes stale same-model semantic references after a revision.

ANYgeometry adapter

from any3dview.adapters.anygeometry import DisplayPolicy, GeometryLayer

layer = GeometryLayer(model, DisplayPolicy(mode="combined"))
viewer.add_layer(layer)

The optional adapter is qualified against ANYgeometry 0.4.0/schema 4 public records and change sets. Stable chunks, entity-generation tessellation caches, bounded cross-thread polling, revision-gap resynchronization and replacement-lineage selection keep geometry ownership separate from display data. Geometry, structural, topology-debug, relationships and combined policies are available.

Shape tessellation is available through any3dview.shapes; every builder returns a Mesh without importing a renderer. Selection queries are provided by ProjectedSelectionIndex, allowing a backend to expose point, directional box and lasso selection with visible/through depth policy.

The section-plane convention retains the half-space where normal · point >= offset. The normal is normalized and the offset remains a world-space distance.

Performance qualification

The standalone benchmark records platform, driver, commit plus dirty-tree GPU source digest, scene, median/p95 CPU and GPU frame times, upload and cached-pick timings, camera-motion upload deltas, Python allocation deltas, a defined 30-second no-redraw idle sample, per-frame draw calls and array memory as JSON:

$env:PYTHONPATH = "C:\Github\ANY3dView\src"
python C:\Github\ANY3dView\benchmarks\run_gpu.py `
  --output C:\Github\ANY3dView\benchmark-results\reference-current.json

It exercises approximately one million opaque triangles, the same scene with structural edges, one million scalar values and one million displacement vectors at 1920x1080 with a two-second warm-up per render scene and ten-second orbit samples. Field latency is conservatively measured from the retained handle update through a rendered frame and an OpenGL completion barrier after the unchanged topology has already been synchronized.

Development

pip install -e .[dev]
pytest
python -m build
twine check dist/*

Native TkGL lifecycle tests are opt-in:

$env:ANY3DVIEW_RUN_GUI_TESTS = "1"
python -m pytest tests/test_gpu_widget.py

License

Starting with version 0.5.5, ANY3dView is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. See LICENSE. Earlier releases remain under the license terms that accompanied those releases.

The optional GPU backend bundles the separately licensed native TkGL component; see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.