Pretty Lattice is a crystal visualization tool for creating beautiful, publication-ready figures.
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- Pretty: tasteful defaults for colors, materials, lighting, and depth
- Simple: an intuitive browser GUI for loading, viewing, and exporting structures
- Reliable: structure parsing and analysis powered by the mature pymatgen package
- Scalable: smooth interaction with systems up to 10k atoms
- Customizable: tune colors, radii, materials, opacity, orientation, and export settings
I always find it harder than it should be to make a good-looking crystal figure.
Traditional crystallographic tools such as VESTA are powerful, but their visual defaults often feel outdated: harsh color palettes, low-quality 3D shading, and a lot of manual tweaking before the result looks acceptable. You could import the structure into professional 3D software such as Cinema 4D or Blender, but that feels like overkill and comes with a much steeper learning curve.
Pretty Lattice is my attempt to fill that gap. Built on Three.js, it stays (relatively) lightweight without compromising visual quality. It offers a modern, intuitive interface with familiar controls researchers expect, and produces clean, aesthetically pleasing figures out of the box.
pip install pretty-latticeOr install as an isolated tool with uv:
uv tool install pretty-latticeRequirements:
- Python 3.12+
- macOS, Linux, or Windows
- Any modern browser
After installation, start the local GUI:
prl guiPretty Lattice starts a local server and opens your browser automatically.
Run once without installing:
uvx --from pretty-lattice prl guiUseful launch options:
prl gui --no-open # start the server without opening a browser
prl gui -p 0 # choose any available port automatically
Pretty Lattice is released under the MIT License.