Last Updated: February 25, 2016

VTK renders into IPython Notebook

This function takes a vtkRenderer object and displays the output directly into IPython Notebook

def vtk_show(renderer, w=100, h=100):
 """
 Takes vtkRenderer instance and returns an IPython Image with the rendering.
 """
 renderWindow = vtkRenderWindow()
 renderWindow.SetOffScreenRendering(1)
 renderWindow.AddRenderer(renderer)
 renderWindow.SetSize(w, h)
 renderWindow.Render()

 windowToImageFilter = vtkWindowToImageFilter()
 windowToImageFilter.SetInput(renderWindow)
 windowToImageFilter.Update()

 writer = vtkPNGWriter()
 writer.SetWriteToMemory(1)
 writer.SetInputConnection(windowToImageFilter.GetOutputPort())
 writer.Write()
 data = str(buffer(writer.GetResult()))

 from IPython.display import Image
 return Image(data)

Read article: (http://pyscience.wordpress.com/2014/09/03/ipython-notebook-vtk/)