Development

Development is in progress and hosted on Github. Please use the issue tracker for feature requests, bug reports and more general questions.

The target for input files is the ASCII format used by v_sim, a useful program and currently one of the only tools available for visualising phonons. These files contain all the information needed to define a crystal sructure and its vibrations. It is presumed that these are generated by Phonopy from ab initio electronic structure calculations, and initially this code will only target the features used by Phonopy. Extension to the full ASCII format is of course welcome.

Animation and rendering is done in Blender. The preferred approach to scripting Blender is to write an “addon” which carries out importing duties. However, the target user for ascii-phonons is not familiar with Blender’s interface and should not need to learn it. A traditional Blender addon, accessed throught the Blender GUI, is therefore inappropriate. In theory Blender can be built as a Python library but this appears to be quite difficult and would create a high barrier to use. Instead, ascii-phonons works by creating an addon library for Blender, creating a temporary script file which uses this library and calling Blender as a subprocess.

The initial target platforms are modern GNU/Linux distributions and Mac OS X. Operation under Windows is not actively being tested, but is desirable.