SynthetMic

A Python package for generating synthetic polycrystalline microstructures using Laguerre diagrams, powered by pysdot.

Installation

To install the latest version of the package via pip, run

pip install synthetmic

If you are using uv to manage your project, run the following command instead:

uv add synthetmic

Usage

To use this package to generate synthetic microstructures (say Laguerre diagrams), you need to import the generator class as follows:

from synthetmic import LaguerreDiagramGenerator

Create an instance of the class with the default arguments:

generator = LaguerreDiagramGenerator()

or with custom parameters:

generator = LaguerreDiagramGenerator(
            tol=0.1,
            n_iter=5,
            damp_param=1.0,
)

We can fit this class to some data by calling the fit method. For example, we can create a Laguerre tessellation of the unit cube [0, 1] x [0, 1] x [0, 1] with 1000 cells of equal volume as follows:

import numpy as np
from synthetmic import DiagramConfig
    
domain = np.array([[0, 1],[0, 1],[0, 1]])
domain_vol = np.prod(domain[:, 1] - domain[:, 0])
    
n_grains = 1000
    
seeds = np.column_stack(
        [np.random.uniform(low=d[0], high=d[1], size=n_grains) for d in domain]
)
volumes = (np.ones(n_grains) / n_grains) * domain_vol

config = DiagramConfig(
    seeds=seeds,
    volumes=volumes,
    domain=domain,
)

# call the fit method on data
generator.fit(config=config)

After calling the fit method, you can use the instance to get various properties of the diagram, e.g., get the centroids and vertices of the cells:

centroids = generator.get_centroids()
vertices = generator.get_vertices()

print("diagram centroids:\n", centroids)
print("diagram vertices:\n", vertices)

You can plot the diagram in static or interactive mode by using the fitted instance:

from synthetmic.plot import plot_cells_as_pyvista_fig
plot_cells_as_pyvista_fig(
        generator=generator,
        save_path="./example_diagram.html",
)

The generated HTML file can be viewed via any browser of your choice.

If you prefer a static figure, you can save it as a pdf, eps, ps, or svg file. For example:

plot_cells_as_pyvista_fig(
        generator=generator,
        save_path="./example_diagram.pdf",
    )

To see more usage examples, see the examples folder or check below on how to run them via cli.py.

The example above uses custom data. If you would like to use the data provided by this package, it can be loaded from the synthetmic.data.paper and synthetmic.data.toy modules. The former gives access to the data for generating some figures from this paper and the latter provides access to some useful toy data. All data creators or loaders from these modules return a synthetmic.data.utils.DiagramConfig object.

from synthetmic.data.paper import create_example5p5_data

config = create_example5p5_data(is_periodic=False)
generator.fit(config)

Working with source codes

Build from source

If you would like to build this project from source either for development purposes or for any other reason, it is recommended to install uv. This is what is adopted in this project. To install uv, follow the instructions in this link.

If you don't want to use uv, you can use other alternatives like pip.

The following instructions use uv for building synthetmic from source.

1. Clone the repository by running

   git clone https://github.com/synthetic-microstructures/synthetmic
   

2. Create a python virtual environment by running

    uv venv .venv --python PYTHON_VERSION
   

   Here, PYTHON_VERSION is the supported Python version. Note that this project requires version >=3.12.3

3. Activate the virtual environment by running

   source .venv/bin/activate
   

4. Prepare all modules and dependencies by running the following:

   uv sync --all-extras
   

Running examples

We created a command line interface (cli) for recreating some of the examples provided in the this paper (and lots more!).

To check the available commands in the cli, run

python cli.py --help

There are currently two commands available in the cli: recreate and analyse.

You can check information about each of these commands by running

python cli.py COMMAND --help

where COMMAND is any of the commands.

Running a command with its appropriate args is simple. For instance, if you would like to recreate some of the two-dimensional examples in the above-mentioned paper, and save the generated plots in the ./plots dir, run

python cli.py recreate --example 2d --save-dir ./plots

You can do the same for three-dimension examples. You can pass the flag --interactive or -i to save the generated plots as a .html file, which can then be opened in a browser to interact with them:

python cli.py recreate --example 2d --save-dir ./plots --interactive

Note: by default, the generated plots will be saved as .pdf. Passing --interactive flag to 2d case will be skipped since this is not that interesting for interactivity.

Running tests

To run all tests, run

pytest -v tests

Authors and maintainers

• R. O. Ibraheem
• D. P. Bourne
• S. M. Roper

References

If you use this package in your research, please refer to the link to this project. Additionally, please consider citing the following paper:

@article{Bourne01112020,
author = {D. P. Bourne and P. J. J. Kok and S. M. Roper and W. D. T. Spanjer},
title = {Laguerre tessellations and polycrystalline microstructures: a fast algorithm for generating grains of given volumes},
journal = {Philosophical Magazine},
volume = {100},
number = {21},
pages = {2677--2707},
year = {2020},
publisher = {Taylor \& Francis},
doi = {10.1080/14786435.2020.1790053},
URL = {https://doi.org/10.1080/14786435.2020.1790053},
eprint = {https://doi.org/10.1080/14786435.2020.1790053}
}

You may also be interested in some of our other libraries:

• LPM - MATLAB code for generating synthetic polycrystalline microstructures using Laguerre diagrams
• pyAPD - a Python library for computing anisotropic Laguerre diagrams
• SynthetMic-GUI - a web app for generating 2D and 3D synthetic polycrystalline microstructures using Laguerre tessellations