[petsc-users] PETSc recommended visualization packages

[Brad Aagaard]

Hi,

I agree with Blaise's assessment of ParaView. It is good for quick and
dirty visualization, but its scripting interface is very limited.

MayaVi provides a GUI along with high-level API access to VTK data
structures through Python. One can update/modify the data values through
the API without ever writing VTK compatible files. I read my data from
HDF5 files using PyTables and create VTK data objects using the API. A
similar mechanism could be used for data stored using SQLite. I think
some Linux and Mac packaging systems include MayaVi; I usually build
from source.

Regards,
Brad


On 07/05/2011 07:58 AM, Blaise Bourdin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Let me add to Barry's frustration. I have spent most the last week
> trying to render animations of reasonably large computations (about
> 25M 3d unstructured elements divided in up to 25,000 exodusII
> files).
>
> - Paraview is simple to get started with in the GUI. In theory, it is
> scriptable in python, but there is pretty much no documentation on
> the python API, which seems to be a mismatched combination of vtk
> calls, and several levels / revisions / versions of paraview
> interfaces. It is possible to generate a python trace of gui
> interactions, but for some reasons, some actions (image format and
> sizes, movies framnerates, for instance) are not recorded. - visit's
> gui take a little more time to master, it is also scriptable in
> python. The python capture is more readable, and is somewhat
> documented (the doc is for 1.4.0, the current version 2.3.0). Movie
> generation is a pain and as far as I understand not feasible inside a
> python script. Instead, one has to save a session, and reopen it with
> the -movie CL interface. - Unless you are willing to rebuild visit or
> paraview from source (which is highly non-trivial and poorly
> documented), all these package install their own python, so that you
> don't have access to all other packages you may have on your system.
> I was not able to figure out how to import paraview or visit from my
> own python using the binary distributions - EnSight is a good
> alternate choice if you can afford it. It is not open and not cheap
> but is quite good, reads most major format and has a pretty
> responsive support team. Their python scripting is well documented,
> but as far as I understand, it is not possible to import ensight from
> a python script. Instead, Ensight runs python scripts.
>
> - About data formats: hdf5 / xdmf seems very well supported, but
> again, human-readable documentation on xdmf is lacking. It would be
> really nice if one could generate the proper xdmf description and
> geometry from a dm of a dmmesh. Would it be also possible to
> interface with moab and gain access to all the file formats they
> support?
>
> Finally, I am skeptical about the benefit of implementing yet another
> file format that is incompatible with existing analysis, post
> processing, and mesh generation tools.
>
> Blaise