3D-accellerated plotting, as flexible as matlab, mathematica etc?

Question

I am looking for a library to plot large data sets with a feature set similar to professional plotting tools (e.g. Matlab, Mathematica), but 3D accelareted. In particular I value

• can be scripted like the professional tools above (flexible usage)
• has a feature at least as big as these
• fast (well, that's what the title says)

I can imagine (actually, I have very much in mind) something like this might exist for python - say, NumPy, SciPy. But I am not well-versed with these libraries yet. It would be great if I could convince people to abandon matlab.

Answer 1

Check out Mayavi, a 3d visualization package for Python that wraps around VTK. It's very flexible, has decent documentation, and hardware-accelerated rendering.