[Paraview] Ensight measured/particle file format and paraview

[Viksit Gaur]

Hi again all,

I recently got back to tackle my original problem of simulating a 
particle system using paraview. I was just going through some old emails 
which I'd talked to Renato and Samuel in.. and read through a lot of the 
documentation too.

I've since come to the conclusion that the VTK XML files are of not too 
much to use to me, since I expect to have upwards of 100,000 particles 
in the system. I then looked at the Fortran routines available at 
Renato's webpage, as well as the documentation available on the gold 
file format.

The Ensight Gold measured/particle file format featured in section 11.1 
of the manual seems to be exactly what i need...


A description line
particle coordinates
#_of_Particles
id xcoord ycoord zcoord
id xcoord ycoord zcoord
.
.
.

Well, has anyone worked with this before? Have you been successful in 
reading these files into paraview? (I haven't, hence the question). 
Also, are these files binary, or ASCII?

I also remember Sam Key talking about cells, and other structures used 
to simulate and represent data in 3D. Are those necessary if this format 
already exists?

[My intention, is to have a number of time steps for a particle system 
with say n particles, and over each step, the X, Y and Z coordinates of 
the particles change. This when run as an animation, with some suitable 
glyphs should (hopefully) do what I expect it to.. simulate the movement 
of the system.]

Thanks!
Viksit


-- 
Viksit Gaur
Deptt. of Computer Science
Yale University

me at viksit dot com
http://viksit.com