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Frequently asked questions

Q: Installing Taichi with pip, complains package not found.

A: Is your Python version >= 3.6, and 64-bit? See :ref:`troubleshooting`.

Q: Do we have something like ti.pi?

A: No, but you may use math.pi or numpy.pi instead. Taichi is able to bake in these constants during JIT, so your kernels incur no runtime cost.

Q: How do I force an outermost loop to be serial, i.e. not parallelized?

A: Try this trick:

for _ in range(1):  # I'm the outer-most loop!
    for i in range(100):  # This loop will not be parallelized
        ...

Q: What's the most convenient way to load images / textures into Taichi fields?

A: Simply use field.from_numpy(ti.imread('filename.png')).

Q: Can Taichi co-operate with other Python packages like matplotlib?

A: Yes, as long as that package provides an interface with numpy, see :ref:`other_python_packages`.

Q: Shall we add some handy functions like ti.smoothstep or ti.vec3?

A: No, but we provide them in an extension library Taichi GLSL , install it using:

python -m pip install taichi_glsl

Q: How can I render 3D results without writing a ray tracer myself?

A: You may export it with :ref:`export_ply_files` so that you could view it in Houdini or Blender.
Or make use the extension library Taichi THREE to render images and update to GUI in real-time.

Q: How do I declare a field with dynamic length?

A: What you want may be the dynamic SNode, a kind of sparse field, see :ref:`dynamic`.
Or simply allocate a dense field large enough, and another 0-D field field_len[None] for length record. But in fact, the dynamic SNode could be slower than the latter solution, due to the cost of maintaining the sparsity information.

Q: Can a user iterate over irregular topologies (e.g., graphs or tetrahedral meshes) instead of regular grids?

A: These structures have to be represented using 1D arrays in Taichi. You can still iterate over them using for i in x or for i in range(n).
However, at compile time, there's little the Taichi compiler can do for you to optimize it. You can still tweak the data layout to get different runtime cache behaviors and performance numbers.