[tkoz]

Paraview is as important as the meshing and solvers. It is the prime way to access results. More than half of the queries/problems posted on this board and others regarding openfoam are related to paraview and parafoam and the special readers.


Couldn't a knowledgeable person go over the paraview related queries, the installation scripts (which fail in many cases) and the documentation concerned with paraview access using parafoam and the special reader. Many people don't have the perseverance I do in getting this running and likely give up and move onto other software. I would volunteer to help.


I think these issues need to be resolved and are essential for the increase in the size of the openfoam community.


tom kosvic

[olesen]

Originally Posted by tkoz

Paraview is as important as the meshing and solvers. It is the prime way to access results. More than half of the queries/problems posted on this board and others regarding openfoam are related to paraview and parafoam and the special readers.

To me it seems reasonable to side-step the entire problem by simply using the stock paraview binaries:

https://discourse.paraview.org/t/i-w...uld-i-use/7232

IMO any missing functionality should be added into the VTK/ParaView reader.

[tkoz]

As Mark suggested above,


If I run "paraFoam - builtin" that does start paraview 5.9 that is the system installed paraview from opensuse repos and it loads in the case directory with the proper case file. It does read the case data and display things.



Of course, there is no openfoam paraview special reader that starts. My question is:

What capabilities have been lost by not running openfoam reader, i.e., what special things does the openfoam reader do that makes it of better use in openfoam case runs?


Could another reader be written that would be read by the paraview system version that could replicate these features? Or as suggested above, could capabilities be added to VTK/ParaView reader. I have not yet looked at this file.



thanks all for any ideas. tom kosvic

[olesen]

Originally Posted by tkoz

As Mark suggested above,

My question is:
What capabilities have been lost by not running openfoam reader, i.e., what special things does the openfoam reader do that makes it of better use in openfoam case runs?

Could another reader be written that would be read by the paraview system version that could replicate these features? Or as suggested above, could capabilities be added to VTK/ParaView reader. I have not yet looked at this file.

thanks all for any ideas. tom kosvic

Hi Tom,
Since you asked for any ideas, here are a whole bunch of them

Differences: https://develop.openfoam.com/Development/openfoam/-/wikis/modules/visualization#do-i-really-need-the-paraview-plugins

Lagrangian data from the openfoam.org version will not work: https://discourse.paraview.org/t/paraview-unable-to-read-lagrangian-data-openfoam/3456/8

There are still some gaps that we'd like to close, most notably support for the collated file format. For proper efficiency, the VTK internals of the reader would need changing from a MultiBlock to a composite format:

• https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-/issues/18157

Moving to the composite format would also make it easier to select face/cellZones. They can currently be read, but not easily selected without the ParaView GUI becoming extremely difficult to navigate. Keep in mind that the VTK/ParaView reader is always multi-region (unlike the plugin version), so there is potentially a lot more things that can be selected.

We are, however, making steady progress. Many of the changes were too late for paraview-5.9, but should be in paraview-5.10. Here are some relevant entry points so that you can see what has been worked on:

• https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-...s/7273/commits
• https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-...s/7531/commits
• https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-...s/7602/commits
• https://gitlab.kitware.com/vtk/vtk/-...s/8030/commits

[tkoz]

The references in the above response gives a good picture of the differences between the functionality of the paraview native reader and the openfoam paraview reader. I am not totally cognizant of the meanings of the functionality categories but it appears that running a couple of openfoam utilities can provide most of the functionality of the openfoam reader. This includes:


foamToVTK for faceSets, faceZones , and
blockMesh -write-vtk to generate block topology as a VTK file


I need to test this out and I will report any problems that may occur.


I think I will end my quest to fully compile paraview within the openfoam methodology and will use the opensuse builtin 5.9 paraview and run these additional utilities. It looks like paraview 5.10 will further reduce any differences.
My cases will be so rudimentary that likely I will never need the additional functionality but at least I am somewhat familiar with any functionality decriments of not having the openfoam reader and not thinking anymore that not having the openfoam reader has made this a lost cause.



Thanks for filling in the informational gaps.



Tom Kosvic