Visualization

LAMMPS can produce on-the-fly NetPBM, JPG, PNG, or TGA snapshot images via its dump image command. See the LAMMPS Visualization Howto for some examples and suggestions for using it most effectively. LAMMPS-GUI has an image viewer dialog that allows to configure many of the dump image features from a GUI. However, for high-quality, interactive visualization, you need tools like those discussed on this page.

Packages we have used

LAMMPS can either write output files directly in an input format recognized by these programs (see the dump command), or auxiliary tools may be included in the distribution to convert to the needed format:

• VMD
• AtomEye
• OVITO
• ParaView
• PyMOL
• Raster3d
• RasMol

Our group has also written and released a toolkit called Pizza.py, which provides tools for LAMMPS pre- and post-processing and includes a simple OpenGL-based visualization tool called gl. Pizza.py is written in Python, is available on GitHub or from the download page, and includes Python wrappers that drive the Raster3d and RasMol packages listed above, plus tools that convert LAMMPS output into input files readable by VMD and AtomEye.

Other tools

These are visualization tools we know less about, but which have features that may be attractive to LAMMPS users:

• QMGA — Guido Germano (Philipps-Universität Marburg) sent a link to his freely available package QMGA, which does OpenGL rendering of non-spherical (and spherical) objects. This can be useful for visualizing aspherical particles simulated with LAMMPS.
• VisIt — a general-purpose visualization package developed at LLNL with support for LAMMPS dump file formats, as explained here.