Exporting a 3D numpy to a VTK file for viewing in Paraview/Mayavi

It's not a direct answer to your question, but if you have tvtk (if you have mayavi, you should have it), you can use it to write your data to vtk format. (See: http://code.enthought.com/projects/files/ETS3_API/enthought.tvtk.misc.html )

It doesn't use PyEVTK, and it supports a broad range of data sources (more than just structured and unstructured grids), so it will probably work where other things aren't.

As a quick example (Mayavi's mlab interface can make this much less verbose, especially if you're already using it.):

import numpy as np
from enthought.tvtk.api import tvtk, write_data

data = np.random.random((10,10,10))

grid = tvtk.ImageData(spacing=(10, 5, -10), origin=(100, 350, 200), 
                      dimensions=data.shape)
grid.point_data.scalars = np.ravel(order='F')
grid.point_data.scalars.name = 'Test Data'

# Writes legacy ".vtk" format if filename ends with "vtk", otherwise
# this will write data using the newer xml-based format.
write_data(grid, 'test.vtk')

And a portion of the output file:

# vtk DataFile Version 3.0
vtk output
ASCII
DATASET STRUCTURED_POINTS
DIMENSIONS 10 10 10
SPACING 10 5 -10
ORIGIN 100 350 200
POINT_DATA 1000
SCALARS Test%20Data double
LOOKUP_TABLE default
0.598189 0.228948 0.346975 0.948916 0.0109774 0.30281 0.643976 0.17398 0.374673 
0.295613 0.664072 0.307974 0.802966 0.836823 0.827732 0.895217 0.104437 0.292796 
0.604939 0.96141 0.0837524 0.498616 0.608173 0.446545 0.364019 0.222914 0.514992 
...
...

It's been forever and I had entirely forgotten asking this question but I ended up figuring it out. I've written a post about it in my blog (PyScience) providing a tutorial on how to convert between NumPy and VTK. Do take a look if interested:

pyscience.wordpress.com/2014/09/06/numpy-to-vtk-converting-your-numpy-arrays-to-vtk-arrays-and-files/