What can Paraview do for me?

Paraview is a visualization software capable of reading almost any kind of input file and do 2D and 3D rendering of scientific data.One can go from a basic CSV file to more complex formats like the VTK based ones (http://www.vtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/file-formats.pdf).

It allows you to improve the presentation of your results for scientific and general public.

(I cannot upload files  so I have some images here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3o2OfQ3KYoqWS1kOTJ1RTZoZzQ)

Some useful ideas:

• It can add tracers to vectorial quantities
• Break a 3D domain into planes to show what is happening with some of the quantities
• Paraview can actually do calculations with the vectors on your results: For example in my case, after a very long simulation I needed a quantity that I did not simulate, the enstrophy. However, I had the vorticity and its integral gave me the result I wanted.
• Add streamlines

Animations, oh yeah!

Perhaps one of the most coolest awesomest feature in Paraview is to make animations quite easily.

In order to animate something you can either provide:

• A set of input files that are numbered sequentially. In that case we can get a temporal animation.
• A single file. In this case we can animate the camera to visit certain regions of the rendered results in order to show something interesting that is happening
  • In this example I also used a feature called "save state..." which will write all your interactions with Paraview in the current session to disk. It is very useful to load a particular set of interactions and improve them.

Paraview and OpenSees

• The PVD recorder works, yay!
• The PVD recorder does not work on parallel, duh!
• However, we can make a very simple python script to translate the input + outputs into a suitable format. I was almost there last week, but when trying to re-write the code to be nicer I erased most of it. Anyways, it can be done and it can be an alternative to the recorder.

Some last thoughts

• Paraview works fine, is free but the learning curve may be difficult
• Sung and I can always try to help into getting some nice animations
• "Paraview works on parallel" is kind of a lie, at least in my past life experience.
• A lot of resources around the internets!