PARAVIEW CONNECTIVITY MOVIE
PARAVIEW CONNECTIVITY SERIAL
PARAVIEW CONNECTIVITY PRO
PARAVIEW CONNECTIVITY SOFTWARE

PARAVIEW CONNECTIVITY PRO

Pro Tip: Use touch open.foam to create an empty file in Linux (or just save an empty file from your text editor).

PARAVIEW CONNECTIVITY SERIAL

You can open serial or decomposed cases, choose which variables & surfaces you’re interested in & other good stuff. You just need to create an empty file in your case directory with the extension “.foam” & ParaView will open it using its built-in reader. If I need to read a case into an interactive session, I’ll use the built-in OpenFOAM reader. You get a reconstructed dataset (without actually having to reconstruct the case) and ParaView can read EnSight files directly – handy. If I need to share volume data with a client, then I’ll export the OpenFOAM case in EnSight format (using foamToEnsight). I export my OpenFOAM assets as VTK or VTP files & read them into ParaView using the native readers. There is a LOT of choice when it comes to file formats & ParaView. I’ve got a cheatsheet on using it – shout if you want it. You can include all the bits you need & skip those you don’t. With a handful of commands you can produce a custom stand-alone binary for any recent-ish ParaView release. Thankfully Kitware (the team behind ParaView) have taken the sting out of this process with something called ParaView-Superbuild.

PARAVIEW CONNECTIVITY SOFTWARE

So, to get around this, I compile my own version of ParaView using the fastest software rendering libraries. There are a few different flavours of software rendering & the best ones weren’t included in the ParaView binaries (I think they are now, but haven’t tested them). When I use ParaView on AWS it’s on a machine with no real graphics hardware 🐌 To speed things up I use ParaView’s offscreen/software rendering capabilities. If you’ve got the right port open on your firewall & you’re using the same version of ParaView at both ends – then you’re good to go. More than good enough for most tasks & without having to bring your data back to base. It’s not as snappy as having everything on your local machine, but it’s streets ahead of a remote desktop connection. Or you’re connecting to a server in a datacenter on the other side of the globe. Whether you’re using it to connect a client on your laptop to a server on your workstation. Saving you the time & expense of moving simulation data around the place. In it’s simplest form you, run a graphical client on your local machine & read the data into a server somewhere else. Please don’t use ParaView via a remote desktop connection 🙏 the client-server option is your friend. If so, here are a few nuggets that I’ve picked up along the way which might be of interest… Client-Server

That’s the process at a high level & it’s probably quite like yours. The exports from OpenFOAM, the image generation in pvbatch and the animation building are all done on the same instance that ran the simulation. Then I’ll use a player that supports scrubbing (like QuickTime or VLC) to play them back later as a flick book.

PARAVIEW CONNECTIVITY MOVIE

Most of my standard outputs are animations, so I’ll use FFmpeg to bundle the images into an MP4 movie file. I use Python scripts & the ParaView script runner (pvbatch) to produce the images. It’s not perfect but it’s a quick & easy way to start figuring out which Python commands you need. Pro Tip: Use Trace (Tools > Start Trace) in an interactive ParaView session to record the Python commands that correspond to what you’ve just done. The exports are done in parallel, so no need to reconstruct the model & they’re lightweight to use in ParaView.īatch plots are automated using ParaView’s Python API (the simple one & even that one tests my limited Python Skillz). For the batch processing I export the assets I need – surfaces, slices, streamlines, etc. That’s the only time I read complete cases into ParaView. On the occasions that I need to dig a little deeper, I’ll fire up an interactive session & have a poke around. Each project has its standard set of animations, output at the end of each run, for quick & easy comparison with previous results. Most of my post-pro is generated in batch mode. It’s got everything I need to do my day-to-day post-pro, it’s open-source and it plays nicely with OpenFOAM – a triple bonus. It was pretty good then & it’s come a long way since. I’m a huge fan of ParaView, I remember stumbling across it while looking for an EnSight replacement around 12 years ago. We’re 10+ issues in now & we haven’t had any ParaView content yet – let’s remedy that, right now. It’s Robin from CFD Engine, back with your weekly slice of CFD goodness.

Paraview connectivity