[Paraview] Unstructured Grids

[Moreland, Kenneth]

That is a pretty open ended question.  Unstructured grids are defined by an
array of point coordinates and a separate array of cell topologies.  In your
case, the list of points will simply correspond to each particle, and each
cell will be a 0D cell (a vertex) that points to a single point.  There are
actually two types of unstructured data supported, poly data and
unstructured grid.  All things being equal, I would probably use the poly
data type because you won't have to identify each cell type.

ParaView supports multiple file formats for this type of data.  One you can
use is the legacy data format.  It's not an optimal file format, but it's
easy to make these files and the documentation is readily available from the
VTK User's Guide and the ParaView wiki
((http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/images/5/51/VTK-File-Formats.pdf).  This
format does not support time natively, but you can write out a sequence of
files with incremental numbering, and ParaView will read that as a time
series.  The files could look something like the following (with the <..>
replaced with an appropriate value).

# vtk DataFile Version 2.0
<A descriptive comment>
ASCII

DATASET POLYDATA
POINTS <num_particles> double
<P0x> <P0y> <P0z>
<P1x> <P1y> <P1z>
...
<Pn-1x> <Pn-1y> <Pn-1z>

VERTICES <num_particles> <2*num_particles>
1 0
1 1
...
1 n-1

POINT_DATA <num_particles>
SCALARS <field_name> double 1
LOOKUP_TABLE default
S0 S1 ... Sn-1

-Ken


On 9/24/08 3:18 AM, "christopher mccabe" <mccabec67 at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> Hi
>
> I am new to using Paraview and would like some assistance if possible.  I am
> researching particle dynamics and need to create files for unstructured grids.
> For the moment as I have just started all I have are particle locations, but I
> will later require several physcial variables for view.
>
> So I have a problem in which X number of particles are initially static and
> after an initial shock the particles dissipate. I would like to view the
> simulation of this by a Paraview animation of the particle locations recorded
> at fixed time intervals.
>
> What do I need to write in the vtk file for this , and why?
>
> I am using Paraview 3.2.2
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Chris
>
>
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   ****      Kenneth Moreland
    ***      Sandia National Laboratories
***********
*** *** ***  email: kmorel at sandia.gov
**  ***  **  phone: (505) 844-8919
    ***      fax:   (505) 845-0833