[Paraview] Can I speed up animations if my mesh structure is constant?

[Berk Geveci]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 6:43 PM, Robert Blake <rblake at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Is there a way to speed up Paraview when visualizing animate-able point data
> over a constant unstructured grid?  I've written a simple unstructured grid
> algorithm with the animate-able integer value XXX:
>
> ...
> I'm running this code on a ~4 million node mesh I have.  PVGeometryFilter
> shows me a progress bar in the bottom every time I update XXX.  Due to the
> size of the mesh, this PVGeometryFilter step takes 5-6 seconds, which in
> turn makes the animation unbearably slow.  Is there a better way to write
> this filter?  I assume that PVGeometryFilter is re-calculating the surface
> of my unstructured mesh every time I update XXX.  Is this true?  If so, how
> can I avoid this recalculation?
>
> ----
>
> I created this fake algorithm as a test.  I have time varying data on a 4
> million node mesh and a 33 GBs of time-varying point data.  The node
> locations and connectivity are constant throughout the simulation.  I've had
> two problems visualizing this in Paraview:
>  - Based on my understanding of
> http://paraview.org/Wiki/Talk:VTK/Time_Support, my data set is too large to
> read in all at once as a TemporalDataSet.  Therefore I have to revert to
> this hacky approach in order to add data arrays to a constant mesh.  Did I
> understand the above page correctly?

If your mesh is constant, you have to cache it in a data member and
shallow copy it to the output and then add the time dependent array.
Because VTK does not separate mesh and field data in its algorithms
(this is almost impossible to do in a general toolkit like VTK), all
filters downstream will re-execute.

I think there is a way of speeding up the geometry filter... Let me
think about it.

-berk