ParaView/Users Guide/Included Plugins

Included Plugins

ParaView comes with a collection of plugins that the community has developed.

• Adios

Loads pixie format files written with the Adios library. This reader support the staging capability of Adios which allow the user to pipe simulation kernels to post-processing tools : such as ParaView throw MPI communication channel and follow in live the computation with no disk IO.

• Eye Dome Lighting

A non-photorealistic shading technique designed at EDF (France) to improve depth perception in scientific visualization images.

It relies on efficient post-processing passes implemented on the GPU with GLSL shaders in order to achieve interactive rendering.

• CoProcessingPlugin

Adds extensions to enable exporting state files that can be used by ParaView CoProcessing library.

• Force Time

Overrides the VTK time requests. This can be used to create complex animation with different datasets following independent times evolutions.

Note: As this filter overrides the time requests, time-aware filters such as PathLines or PlotOverTime will not behave correctly if they are inserted in a pipeline after this filter.

• H5PartReader

The H5Part Reader plugin adds support for reading particle datasets stored in H5Part format. H5Part is a simple wrapper around the HDF5 library and provides a number of convenience functions to manage time steps and access field arrays. The reader supports parallel reading of data using hyperslabs, when used with ParaView compiled with MPI and HDF5 with parallel IO enabled, the reader automatically uses hyperslabs to read portions of data on each process.

• Nifti

Reades time varying volumetric/image data from ANALYZE. Supports single (.nii) and dual (.img & .hdr) file storage including zlib compression.

Able to write out ascii or binary files.

• Manta View

A view that uses the University of Utah's Manta Real Time Ray Tracer instead of OpenGL for rendering surfaces

Kitware Source Article

• Moments

Contains a set of filters that helps analysis of flux and circulation fields. Flux fields are defined on 2D cells and describe flows through the area of the cell. Circulation fields are defined on 1D cells and describes flows in the direction of the cell.

• PointSprite

Adds a renderer for point geometry - in particular particle based datasets (though any point based data may be rendered using the provided painter). The plugin permits 3 modes of rendering, which are (in increasing order of complexity), Simple points, texture mapped sprites, and GPU raytraced spheres. The simple point mode allows the user to select a scalar array for the opacity on a per point basis. The texture mode adds support for opacity and radius per point (particle) which is drawn using a user supplied texture (a sphere is provided by default). The GPU mode differs by evaluating a quadric ray/sphere intersection that allow objects to intersect correctly rather than ‘popping’ in and out of view as sprites do. Transfer function editors can be used to map radius/opacity values if simple non-linear lookups are required

• SierraPlotTools

Adds toolbar buttons to carry out convenience macros such as toggling the background color between white and black, switching between surface and surface with edges display mode, and opening a wizard for generating plots of global, nodal, or element variables over time. This plugin works on Exodus data only

• SLACTools

An extension that streamline ParaView's user interface for Stanford Linear Accelerator users.

• Streaming View

Views that render in many streamed passes to reduce memory footprint and provide multiresolution rendering. This plugin replaces the Streaming and Adaptive ParaView derived applications.

Kitware Source Article

• SurfaceLIC

Adds support for Line Integral Convolution over arbitrary surfaces.

• Prism Plugin

A Sandia contributed plugin for verification and debugging of simulation results. The plugin reads SESAME files to determine the inverse mapping from cartesian to phase space and allows users to visually debug simulations. Sesame files hold material model data (Equations of State, Opacities, Conductivities) in a tabular format as described by http://t1web.lanl.gov/doc/SESAME_3Ddatabase_1992.html.

• pvblot

Implementation of a Sandia National Labs scripting language on top of ParaView.

• VisTrails

The VisTrails plugin for ParaView incorporates the provenance management capabilities of VisTrails into ParaView.

All of the actions a user performs while building and modifying a pipeline in ParaView are captured by the plugin. This allows navigation of all of the pipeline versions that have previously been explored.

For more information about this plugin see [1]

• WebGL Exporter

The WebGL exporter plugin brings the ParaViewWeb WebGL code to ParaView to allow a 3D scene to be exported into a standalone HTML page.

• NonOrthogonalSource

This plugin illustrate how to add FieldData to your dataset to customize the CubeAxis that should be presented along with your data.

Typically this plugin allow a creation of a cube that can be sheared by the user by changing some parameters. By doing so, the CubeAxes can follow the generated shape by creating axis along non-orthogonal axis. Moreover, the cube axis can be replaced altogether by a single 3D crossed axis.

That plugin can also be used just to provide a customized cube axes inside you 3D scene without changing any of your original reader of filter with those extra-annotation.

• QuadView

This plugin add a new view into ParaView that allow the user to interactively move a 3D point that will be used to cut the 3D data along 3 planes. Each cut result will be presented inside a 2D view next to each other. More informations can be found here.