[qutadah.r]

I am wondering why some tutorials on youtube use FoamToVTK to view results in paraview instead of just creating a .foam file and open it using paraview.



Is it just another way to open the results or is it different?


Thanks

[nepomnyi]

Here's what I found.


Have a look at the end of the first page. Here's a quote from there:

OpenFOAM includes the foamToVTK utility to convert data from its native format to VTK format, which means that any VTK-based graphics tools can be used to post-process OpenFOAM cases. This provides an alternative means for using ParaView with OpenFOAM.

So, that's an alternative way.



I plan to use it to resolve my issue which is the following. I ran a transient simulation. I got a lot of subfolders for each time step. And if I just type paraFoam, it loads all the time steps. And it takes about 20 minutes. I want to try loading only one time step and I don't know how to do that. I believe that foamToVTK will help me with that.

[qutadah.r]

aha thats interesting, let me check how you could do that.

[qutadah.r]

i found out you can use the following command


foamToVTK -time $100



you can replace 100 with the time directory you want to process and it will only process that to VTK.

[nepomnyi]

Originally Posted by qutadah.r

aha thats interesting, let me check how you could do that.

Hello @qutadah.r. You edited your comment that I'm quoting here. But I did receive the original version of it in my email. And that was a great idea indead!


I tried that a little bit different than you suggested. I copied my entire case folder, but kept only one time step. This way I had all my case files and I didn't have to worry which files exactly I needed to visualize my results in Paraview. Then I went to that copied folder, typed paraFoam and I got my results at only time step loaded very well!


Thank you so much for the idea!

[qutadah.r]

Originally Posted by nepomnyi

Hello @qutadah.r. You edited your comment that I'm quoting here. But I did receive the original version of it in my email. And that was a great idea indead!


I tried that a little bit different than you suggested. I copied my entire case folder, but kept only one time step. This way I had all my case files and I didn't have to worry which files exactly I needed to visualize my results in Paraview. Then I went to that copied folder, typed paraFoam and I got my results at only time step loaded very well!


Thank you so much for the idea!

i did edit my reply because i found we can just enter one command instead of copying files around and still get the same result!


happy it helped!

[nepomnyi]

Originally Posted by qutadah.r

i found out you can use the following command


foamToVTK -time $100



you can replace 100 with the time directory you want to process and it will only process that to VTK.

Thank you @qutadah.r! I posted my question on Research Gate as well and I've got the same suggestion (i.e., to use foamToVTK -time). Here's the link.



I've tried it and the result was strange. I did the following. I went to my original case folder and typed foamToVTK -time $100 (100 is my last time step). Then I typed paraview & to open a Paraview window. Then I loaded my dummy .foam file. It was loaded very fast, but Paraview loaded all the time steps instead of just one. To make sure that all the time steps were loaded I did try different time steps and the results changed with each one of them. Therefore, I concluded that all the time steps were loaded. What most surprising about it is that the results were loaded extremely fast. Whereas, when I use paraFoam command, it takes forever to load all the time steps.

Ivan