8.1.2. Visualize LAMMPS snapshots

LAMMPS itself does not do visualization, but snapshots from LAMMPS simulations can be visualized (and analyzed) in a variety of ways.

Mention dump image and dump movie.

LAMMPS snapshots are created by the dump command which can create files in several formats. The native LAMMPS dump format is a text file (see “dump atom” or “dump custom”) which can be visualized by several popular visualization tools. The dump image and dump movie styles can output internally rendered images and convert a sequence of them to a movie during the MD run. Several programs included with LAMMPS as auxiliary tools can convert between LAMMPS format files and other formats. See the Tools page for details.

A Python-based toolkit distributed by our group can read native LAMMPS dump files, including custom dump files with additional columns of user-specified atom information, and convert them to various formats or pipe them into visualization software directly. See the Pizza.py WWW site for details. Specifically, Pizza.py can convert LAMMPS dump files into PDB, XYZ, EnSight, and VTK formats. Pizza.py can pipe LAMMPS dump files directly into the Raster3d and RasMol visualization programs. Pizza.py has tools that do interactive 3d OpenGL visualization and one that creates SVG images of dump file snapshots.