OVITO is a scientific data visualization and analysis software for atomistic simulation models in materials science and related disciplines. OVITO is freely available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X under an open-source license. It is being developed by Dr. Alexander Stukowski at the Materials Science Department of Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.
The first version of OVITO was released in December 2009 and its initial feature set was described in a journal article about OVITO in 2010. Today OVITO has more than active 50,000 users from the computational physics, materials science, and chemistry fields.
OVITO is a software for visualizing and analyzing output data from particle-based simulation models, notably molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of solid-state materials. Its main focus is on large simulation models based on classical potentials (103 - 108 atoms). Some noteworthy program features are:
Input and output of various file formats used by MD simulation codes, including LAMMPS, XYZ, CFG, IMD, POSCAR, NetCDF, PDB, FHI-aims, and GSD/HOOMD.
Interactive display of large numbers of particles and bonds using hardware-accelerated OpenGL rendering.
Support for various particle shapes: spheres, cubes, ellipsoids, cylinders, and more.
An easy-to-use interface, a flexible software design, and a data model that supports an arbitrary number of particle properties.
High-quality image and movie rendering for publication and a keyframe-based animation system.
A powerful Python-based scripting interface that allows one to automate analysis and visualization tasks and extend OVITO with new functions.
Nondestructive data manipulation and analysis functions are arranged in a data flow pipeline by the user. Parameters can be changed at any time and results will be immediately recalculated. Available modification functions include:
Display of periodic images & wrapping of particles at periodic boundaries
Manual selection of particles and inspection of particle properties
Useful analysis functions:
A modular software design, which allows to extend OVITO via C++ plugins