COMPAS Plotter

2D visualisation of COMPAS geometry and data structures, powered by matplotlib.

compas_plotter is a lightweight way to draw COMPAS objects in 2D. It is the COMPAS 2.x successor of the compas_plotters package that shipped inside COMPAS up to version 1.17, rebuilt on top of the modern compas.scene system.

Highlights

• One entry point — Plotter.add — dispatches any supported COMPAS object to its matplotlib drawing.
• Built on compas.scene: registers a "Plotter" visualisation context, exactly like the Rhino, Blender and Grasshopper backends.
• Dynamic plotting and GIF recording via Plotter.on.

Quick start

from compas.geometry import Point, Line, Polygon
from compas.datastructures import Mesh
from compas_plotter import Plotter

plotter = Plotter(figsize=(8, 5))

mesh = Mesh.from_polyhedron(8)
plotter.add(mesh, show_vertices=True, show_edges=True)
plotter.add(Polygon([[0, 0, 0], [3, 0, 0], [3, 3, 0]]), facecolor=(0.9, 0.9, 1.0))
plotter.add(Line(Point(0, 0, 0), Point(3, 3, 0)), color=(1, 0, 0), draw_as_segment=True)
plotter.add(Point(1.5, 1.5, 0))

plotter.zoom_extents()
plotter.show()

Supported objects

Category	Objects
Geometry	Point, Vector, Line, Polyline, Polygon, Circle, Ellipse, Frame
Shapes (drawn as XY projections)	Box, Sphere, Cylinder, Cone, Capsule, Torus, Polyhedron
Data structures	Mesh, Graph

Roadmap

The following are not yet supported. They are likely to be added as XY projections, following the existing ShapeObject:

• Brep and Surface — tessellate to a mesh, then project (Brep needs an optional backend such as compas_occ)
• NurbsCurve — sampled to a polyline
• VolMesh and Plane

Next steps

• Installation
• Tutorial
• API Reference