OVITO is a scientific data visualization and analysis software for large-scale 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 publicly available version of OVITO was released in December 2009. As of summer 2015, OVITO has more than active 30,000 users from the computational physics, materials science, and chemistry fields. To introduce the software package to the community, a journal article about OVITO was published in 2010.
OVITO is a software for visualizing and analyzing output data from particle-based simulations, notably molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of solid-state materials. Its main application area are large simulations based on classical potentials (103 - 108 particles). 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, and FHI-aims.
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, 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 allows you 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 updated. 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