[jens_klostermann]

Hi Frank,

Does it work with the /system/controlDict (without the controlDict.foam)?
Choose File -> Open -> Files of Type -> All Files (*)
and than OpenFoam. (all the way down!)

Jens

[lr103476]

Hi Jens,

That seems to work! Apparently the compilation process was successful.

What does not work are the time dirs.....How do I visualise those ??

Regards, Frank

[lr103476]

Never mind, it works! thanks Jens,

Frank

ps: The time dirs are on a different tab compared to 2.4.

[jens_klostermann]

Hi Frank,

so it look like your links "system/controlDict.foam" are at the wrong place or pointing to the wrong place?

Jens

PS. Paraview-3.3.0 rocks!!

[lr103476]

Hi,

Paraview 3.3.0 is really fast !! It looks so much better, and more efficient (less clicks for same result).

The only thing what I miss is the interpolated point values to visualise smooth pressure and velocity. Now I use the "cell data to point data" filter, which works fine, but this is somewhat tedious when visualising different patches and different cell sets.....

Altogether it works very very well !!!

Regards, Frank

[philippose]

Hi Frank,

Good Evening! And good to see you active again after a fairly long period of "apparent hibernation" :-)!

Could you expand a little on what you exactly meant, when you mentioned that its tedious to visualise different patches and cell sets using the "cell data to point data" filter in Paraview 3.3.0 ?

It would be great to get some feedback from everyone using the OpenFOAM reader for Paraview 3.x.x, to see what needs to be improved, what features need to be added, and which bugs need to be looked into.... :-)!

One question regarding Paraview 3.3.0 ... have you tried using the "Lookmark" feature in PV 3.3.0, with for example, the colour bar (legend) turned on, the data scaled to a specific range, and positioned at a specific view?

It seems to me, that the lookmarks generated by PV3 are much more primitive than the ones generated by the PV2 versions.... On loading a lookmark, I dont get back everything that was present in the scene when the lookmark was made.

Have you had the same problems too?

Regards,

Philippose

[lr103476]

Hi Philippose!

Concerning the hibernation period, I've been quit busy working on the improvement of the moving mesh methods. Right now, some nice results are within reach and the new paraview may be what I need.

What I mean by tedious is that, CellDataToPointData doesn't contain the patches. When visualising the data on a patch I need to use ExtractDataSets which only shows the blocks....It is a minor issue, everything (what I need) seems to work fine....

I'm not familiar with the lookmarks, but it seems to work fine with me. When I find any more problems, I'll post it here....

Furthermore, at first paraview 3.3.0 seems less responsive when the case is very large, I will test this in more detail....For extremely large cases, is there a way to run paraview in batch-mode to create the figures of each time separately. How to use the parallel paraview on a cluster with pbs queue-ing system ?

Regards, Frank

[philippose]

Hello again Frank,

A quick remark regarding your reply.....

In the latest reader from Takuya (which is posted in this thread), if you open an OpenFOAM case, and as the first operation if you run the "Cell Data to Point Data" filter on the mesh data, from then on, you should be able to view the patches as point data.

I havent had to use ExtractDataSets in Paraview 3.3.0 in order to view patches....

Anyway, here are a couple of screenshots....









Are we talking about the same thing :-)!? Or have I completely mis-understood you ??

Regards,

Philippose

[jens_klostermann]

Hi Philippose,

I have some problems with the lookmark tool:

If I create one I get an error message Source deleted with outputs attached. But this error is hard to reproduce.

I confirm that it is quite slow for larger cases but I think still faster than the paraview-2 versions.

improvements for me are:
-the Annotate Time filter
-Annotation "Show cube axes" they fit now with the geometry

some annoying thinks are:
-the color of the annotations is set to white per default, and I don't know where to change the default
-with "Show cube axes" per default the y- and z-axis are relative to the x-axis, This can't be changed at the moment. Right now I take the Transform Filter to solve this issue.
-the Offsets in the Slicing/Cutting Filter have no clear reference to the geometry Data. The frame of reference for the Slicing/Cutting Filter is not the same as for the geometry. So I have to transform it by hand which sucks.

But still I like the new paraview-3.3.x

Jens

[lr103476]

Hi Philippose,

In the properties tab from controlDict, all mesh regions (the patches) are available as well as the cell arrays for p and U.

When I create a "cellDataToPointData" filter on controlDict, I see nothing (only a button ("pass cell to data"), so I cannot select the patches of this "cellDataToPointData" filter.

Of course I should keep all patches and Inernal Mesh active in controlDict in order to visualise slices i.e.

Any ideas on how to active the patches in the "cellDataToPointData" filter ?

Regards, Frank

[philippose]

Hello again,

Okkk... first and foremost :-)! I was actually asking for feedback from users who use the "OpenFOAM reader in" paraview 3.x.x, and not the bugs and shortfalls of Paraview 3.x.x itself :-)! Though... no problems... if anyone involved in the development of Paraview is reading these posts, it would help.

And as for visualisation of the patches.... in Paraview 3.3.0, if you change the patch selection in the properties tab of "controlDict.foam", and press the "Accept" button, these changes are automatically carried down to all the downstream filters....

So... if you make the controlDict.foam tab (which contains the "cell" data) invisible (by clicking on the eye to the left of it), then change the patch selections, and finally press the "Accept" button, the "CellDatatoPointData" filter will only display the patches that are enabled in the "controlDict.foam" tab.

If you are still not clear, maybe I can try to come up with a short video using "Wink" :-)!

Have a nice day!

Philippose

[lr103476]

Thanks for your time! In my opinion, paraview 3.3 is already very well suitable for the use with openfoam. Still I have a small problem when visualising a slice (cut) and the patches.

When I create a cut plane (i.e. to show contours) I need all patches selected in controlDict (especially Internal Mesh). Therefore, I have no success in generating a cut plane AND some patches (without the internal mesh).

Summarising:
1) For the patches: I need to switch off all patches in controlDict except the ones to visualise.
2) For the cut plane: I need to switch on all patches in controlDict, especially Internal Mesh.

I could be that I am not yet fully mastering the basic paraview features....any more ideas?

Good day to you too!!

Frank

[7islands]

Hi ParaView3 users,
As a recent overhaul in the dataset API of the ParaView 3.3 CVS head made the previous (20071023) version of the reader unusable, I made necessary changes to support the new API, in addition to some updates, to the reader, which resulted in a new release here.

The reader now supports the CVS head newer than Feb. 16, 2008 and the 3.2.1 released version. Major changes from the previous version are as follows.

Technical changes: The reader now

• has a builtin cell data to point data filter (not as accurate as the volPoint interpolator in paraFoam but better than the one in ParaView, see Notes).,
• decomposes polyhedral cells (so that you don't have to tetrahedralize).
• supports all combinations of vol/point/lagrangian-Scalar/Vector/SphericalTensor/SymmTensor/Tensor fields.
• handles all fields and point coordinates in single precision for performance and memory footprint reasons.
• has several Mac OS X Leopard specific (but should somewhat work for other OSes too) performance improvements for mid-large cases (> 2-3 million cells).
• outputs empty patches as zero-sized datasets. So you have to have a valid patch definition for every patch even e. g. for defaultFaces with nFaces 0. This change was made to keep the behavior of Extract Block filter as consistent as possible for topo-change cases.

Usability changes: Now you

• can open either an empty stub file <casename>.foam right under the case directory, where <casename> is an arbitrary string other than the strings that starts with "controlDict," or the symbolic link system/controlDict.foam (to system/controlDict) to load an OpenFOAM case. So if you use the stub files you can distinguish the cases in the Pipeline Browser when multiple cases are loaded simultaneously.
• no longer have to create the lagrangian/ subdirectory under the initial timestep directory to load a case with Lagrangians.
• won't see a blank white geometry after loading a case, since the reader now colorize with an appropriate scalar variable (typically CellToPoint/p).

Others:

• Lots of small fine tunings and bug fixes in many corner cases.

Please have a careful look through
ReleaseNotes
before proceeding, and try if you think it's worth trying.
vtkOpenFOAMReader-20080318.tar.bz2
I'd like to express my thanks again to Philippose Rajan for testing the code and having interesting and important discussions.

Regards,
Takuya

[7islands]

And here's a paraFoam-like script, pvFoam, to launch ParaView and load a case with the reader. You have to adjust the paraviewPath variable at line 34 to the path to ParaView. pvFoam Takuya

[7islands]

Hi again ParaView3 Users,

I noticed a rather silly compatibility problem with the Calculator filter, the detail of which is described here, after the release of the 20080318 version. I believe this is a bug in ParaView but anyway the confusing "CellToPoint/" and "Lagrangian/" prefixes had to be changed. Apologies for this frequent update.

Technical change:

• The naming schemes of point filtered arrays and Lagrangian arrays have been changed from CellToPoint/arrayName and Lagrangian/arrayName to CellToPoint[arrayName] and Lagrangian:arrayName so that the array names don't confuse the Calculator filter.

Usability change:

• Now you don't have to create a time directory only for viewing mesh under the constant subdirectory.

Other:

• Added a simple Python scripting example (pythonExample.py).

Here are and.

Takuya

[7islands]

Hi again ParaView3 Users,

I noticed a rather silly compatibility problem with the Calculator filter, the detail of which is described here, after the release of the 20080318 version. I believe this is a bug in ParaView but anyway the confusing "CellToPoint/" and "Lagrangian/" prefixes had to be changed. Apologies for this frequent update.

Technical change:

• The naming schemes of point filtered arrays and Lagrangian arrays have been changed from CellToPoint/arrayName and Lagrangian/arrayName to CellToPoint[arrayName] and Lagrangian:arrayName so that the array names don't confuse the Calculator filter.

Usability change:

• Now you don't have to create a time directory only for viewing mesh under the constant subdirectory.

Other:

• Added a simple Python scripting example (pythonExample.py).

Here are ReleaseNotes and vtkOpenFOAMReader-20080324.tar.bz2 .

Takuya

[stephan]

Hi,

at first thanks for this great reader!!!
i experienced some trouble visualizing lagrangian data. maybe somebody might explain how to do this with the new reader - is this working for binary lagr. data too?
thanx in advance
regards
stephan

[stephan]

hi,

i am actually asking since i get errors like this:

ERROR: In /home/foam13/OpenFOAM/linux/ParaView3/VTK/IO/vtkOpenFOAMReader.cxx, line 5736
vtkOpenFOAMReader (0x871e620): Error reading line 28 of /home/foam13/OpenFOAM/foam13-1.4.1/run/reaktor/1/lagrangian/positions: Expected punctuation token ')', found ���Mb`?���R!��?0
so i am not sure if i do something wrong or if the reader cant handle binaries?
thanks
stephan

[7islands]

Hi Stephan,
With which OF version did you run the case? The reader only supports lagrangian data created by OF version 1.4 or later (maybe I should have written that in the ReleaseNotes).

If the case is run with OF 1.4 or later, would it be possible to send me the problematic positions file? (just a single file will be fine)

Takuya

[stephan]

Hi Takuya,

the file should reach you in second. actually every binary position file seems to show the same problem?!
thanks for helping me!
best regards
stephan