[johannes]

Dear Foamers,

although my question might be better placed in the paraview mailing list, I thought I'll first try if someone here got a comment to this strange (but maybe easy to solve) problem:

On my laptop (openSUSE 11.2 x64) I'm not able to view STL files in ParaView as they obviously aren't loaded correctly by the corresponding reader. I can't see the surface mesh at all and I noticed in the information tab that the bounds (x, y, z range) are completly wrong. In addition, the number of cells and points aren't correct, either.

I tried the following ParaView versions:

• 3.6.1 self-compiled with Qt-4.5.3
• 3.6.1 self-compiled with Qt-4.3.5
• 3.6.1 precompiled (out of ThirdParty-1.6)
• 3.6.1 precompiled (from paraview.org)
• 3.7.0-cvs self-compiled with Qt-4.5.3

The only one that worked and successfully displayed the STL file was the binary from paraview.org.

I'm pretty sure I'm missing something basic which is OS-specific, since I'm using a self-compiled ParaView 3.6.1 with openSUSE 11.1 (x64) and 10.3 (i386) without any problems.

If someone encountered a similiar problem or has an idea about what's going wrong here, please let me know.

Many thanks in advance.

Best regards,
Johannes

[fra76]

Hi,
a while ago I had the same problem and found out that it was related to an extra entry ("colour", if I'm not wrong) in the ascii STL file saved by Ansa.
I wrote a quick fix for the version of paraview I had and submitted the patch to their bug tracking system. They accepted the bug and now it's should be in the distribution.
Might you have any other unrecognised entry in your stl file? What happen if, once the file is loaded, you create gliphs on it, like spheres?

Francesco

[johannes]

Hi Francesco,

thanks for you reply and your input. It sounds possible that my problem could be caused by an unrecognized entry, but I'm afraid it isn't since I tried with a very simple STL file (see lines down below) and I got the same behavior (everything fine with Kitware binaries, all other builds fail).

solid cube_corner
facet normal 0.0 -1.0 0.0
outer loop
vertex 0.0 0.0 0.0
vertex 1.0 0.0 0.0
vertex 0.0 0.0 1.0
endloop
endfacet
facet normal 0.0 0.0 -1.0
outer loop
vertex 0.0 0.0 0.0
vertex 0.0 1.0 0.0
vertex 1.0 0.0 0.0
endloop
endfacet
facet normal 0.0 0.0 -1.0
outer loop
vertex 0.0 0.0 0.0
vertex 0.0 0.0 1.0
vertex 0.0 1.0 0.0
endloop
endfacet
facet normal 0.577 0.577 0.577
outer loop
vertex 1.0 0.0 0.0
vertex 0.0 1.0 0.0
vertex 0.0 0.0 1.0
endloop
endfacet
endsolid

Regarding you second question: Did you mean to create spheres, cubes, cones etc. within ParaView by using the sources menu? If that's the case I can report that this works without problems regardles which ParaView version I choose.

The strangest thing to me is the fact that even the prebuild binaries out of the official ThirdParty-1.6 are showing this behavior, so it seems to be no compiler or compilation related issue. And since many users are running ParaView with a Qt version > 4.3.5 I doubt it even has something to do with Qt... I really haven't a clue at the moment...

Maybe you or others have another idea?

Thanks + best regards,
Johannes