How can Python assist you with 2D and 3D geometry? What tools are available to create, transform, and manipulate such geometries? Can we use these tools to build creative visualizations?

Python has much to say about these questions. In this talk, we will explore the many features of the Python libraries shapely (for 2D geometries) and trimesh (for 3D geometries).

shapely and trimesh are industrial strength libraries used in general, geospatial, and scientific applications. shapely being a dependency of widely used GeoDataFrame library geopandas, and trimesh being used by Ultimaker-Cura, slicing models for 3D printing.

We will learn about 2D and 3D affine transformations, extrusions, boolean operations, and more. Through these lessons, you will see how these tools can be orchestrated to build arbitrarily complex 2D and 3D shapes. Once constructed, these 2D and 3D shapes can be visualized with the creative coding library py5.

In summary, this tutorial will teach you how shapely, trimesh, and py5 can work together to create beautiful visualizations of 2D and 3D geometry.