# Tutorial examples to learn Mayavi

To get acquainted with mayavi you may start up the Mayavi2 application, `mayavi2` in the command line, like so:

    $ mayavi2

On Windows you can double click on the installed `mayavi2.exe` executable (usually in the `Python2X\Scripts` directory), or use the start menu entry, if you installed python(x,y) or EPD.

Once Mayavi starts, you may resize the various panes of the user interface to get a comfortable layout. These settings will become the default “perspective” of the mayavi application. More details on the UI are available in the General layout of UI section.

We give a few detailed examples of how you can use the Mayavi application to tour some of its features. Before proceeding to the examples, it can be useful to locate some data to experiment with. Two of the examples below make use of data shipped with the mayavi sources ship. These may be found in the `examples/data` directory inside the root of the mayavi source tree. If these are not installed, the sources may be downloaded from here: https://github.com/enthought/mayavi

Examples:

- Parametric surfaces: a simple introduction to visualization
- Loading scalar data: the `heart.vtk` example
- Visualizing rich datasets: the `fire_ug.vtu` example
- Using Mayavi with scipy
- Exploring a vector field