[Paraview] Mesh edition / modification with paraview

[Berk Geveci]

> Can the output of a filter be the input once modified and without a copy ?
> (I don't want to create a new vtkDataSet each time an operation is executed)

No, it can't. VTK is designed such that filters never change their
input. Otherwise, the demand-driven pipeline paradigm breaks down.

You can write a custom application based on VTK or ParaView that does
not use the pipeline and can allow editing of meshes in place.
However, this would probably take some significant amount of work.
Another issue you would encounter is that VTK data structures are
designed to be efficient in memory usage and time to setup but not for
quick editing. This follows the demand-driven pipeline design.

My recommendation would probably be to use VTK/ParaView in conjunction
with another library that provides good support for mesh editing.

Best,
-berk

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 6:08 AM, cyril giraudon <cyril.giraudon at free.fr> wrote:
> Thanks David for your answer,
>
> Can the output of a filter be the input once modified and without a copy ?
> (I don't want to create a new vtkDataSet each time an operation is executed)
>
> I'd like to handle a huge amount of data (1000^3 cubes minimum), is the
> IO operation can be a problem for the save to disk task of the mesh ?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Cyril.
>
>
> David E DeMarle a écrit :
>> Yes.
>>
>> ParaView stores data in vtkDataSets, and each filter in ParaView takes
>> in one or more vtkDataSets, looks at them, and produces one or more
>> vtkDataSets (often by shallow copying the inputs).
>>
>> If you understand the vtkDataSet and vtkAlgorithm API's well enough,
>> the operations you describe are fairly easy to accomplish. (See the
>> python programmable filter wiki page for examples).
>>
>> However, providing a good UI that lets the user control which parts of
>> the DataSet geometry and topology are modified is not altogether
>> trivial. That would probably require significant use of vtkWidgets to
>> create the visual editing tools, ParaView's Proxy/Property pattern to
>> map the tools behavior over to the server side filter properties, and
>> how ParaView's QT ObjectPanel interfaces exposes properties in the
>> client application.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 11:09 AM, Cyril Giraudon <cyril.giraudon at free.fr> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> Paraview is very well known in the data visualisation area.
>>>
>>> However, I'd like to know whether it is possible to write a plugin able to
>>> modify a mesh, for instance to move a selected point of a mesh.
>>> By extension, would it be possible to use paraview (with a new plugin) to
>>> edit a structured orthogonal mesh in order to add/remove an edge, a face or
>>> an element (a cube) ?
>>>
>>> Thanks a lot,
>>>
>>> Cyril Giraudon.
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>
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