ase-ovito

An ASE plugin that integrates the OVITO software package as a file I/O backend and visualization engine for atomic structures.

This ASE extension is maintained by the OVITO development team and is available under the MIT license. You don't need a paid license to use it and you don't need to install the OVITO Basic/Pro desktop applications.

Features

• Read atomic structure files via OVITO's Python API - supports all formats that OVITO can read
• Visualize ASE Atoms objects using OVITO's interactive rendering functions

Installation

pip install ase-ovito

This will automatically pull in the following dependencies:

• ase >= 3.22
• ovito >= 3.15

Quick start

Read a file using OVITO as the I/O backend:

import ase.io

atoms = ase.io.read('CoCrNi.POSCAR', format='ovito')

Use this to load all file formats supported by OVITO. The format is auto-detected from the file contents. See ovito.io.import_file documentation for futher arguments that can be passed to the function.

Visualize an ASE Atoms object using an OVITO interactive viewport:

import ase.visualize

ase.visualize.view(atoms, viewer='ovito')

When called from a Jupyter notebook, this displays an embedded interactive widget directly in the browser cell output. When called from a standalone Python script, it opens a native Qt viewport window instead. The ipywidgets package must be installed for the Jupyter widget to work.

Implementation details

The functions in this plugin are based on the ovito.gui and ovito.io.ase modules. The latter provides a low-level bridge between ASE and OVITO. You can use this module directly to convert between ASE Atoms objects and OVITO DataCollection objects, which can then be used as input for any OVITO pipeline or visualization function. See the ovito.io.ase documentation for details.

Requirements

• Python >= 3.10
• ASE >= 3.22
• OVITO Python Package >= 3.15

License

MIT — Copyright (c) 2026 OVITO GmbH, Germany

Source code

https://gitlab.com/ovito-org/ase-ovito