OVITO is a scientific data visualization and analysis software for large-scale atomistic simulations in materials science and engineering. OVITO is freely available under an open-source license for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms. It is being developed and maintained by Alexander Stukowski, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Materials Science at Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany.
The first openly available version of OVITO was released in December 2009, after one and a half years of (part-time) development by the author, who, at that time, was a PhD student doing molecular dynamics simulations of nanocrystalline metals. Since that time, the software has further evolved, and its user base today comprises more than a thousand researchers from the computational materials science and engineering field. To introduce the new software package to the community, an article on OVITO was published in 2010.
OVITO is a software for visualizing and analyzing output data from atomistic simulations of particles, in particular molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of solid-state materials using classical interaction potential. Some noteworthy program features are:
Input and output of various file formats used by MD simulation codes including LAMMPS, XYZ, CFG, IMD, and POSCAR
Interactive display of a large number of particles using hardware-accelerated OpenGL rendering
Visualization of polyhedral meshes
An easy-to-use interface, flexible software design, and a data model that supports an arbitrary number of particle properties.
Processing model: Data modification and analysis functions are arranged in a processing pipeline by the user; parameters can be altered at any time with immediate update of the results. Available modification functions include:
Useful analysis functions:
A modular software design that makes it easy to extend OVITO through plugins