[Paraview] Best way to represent a network of contacts

[William Oquendo]

Dear Eric,

Your first suggestion sounds like the way to go. I call it suggestion
instead of question because I am not actually printing the connectivity
info, I was just wondering what would be the best way for printing that
info. It is relatively easy for me to write the "lines" that join the
centers, and, by using the tube filter, to rescale them. I will let you know
the advances here. I would like also to color the tubes by some other info,
like the strength of the contacts. I will explore the possibilities. I am
sorry in advance if my questions are so simple, I am a newbie for Paraview
and I am trying to avoid asking silly questions =).

As soon as I have the files with the line-connectivity info inside them, I
will post one of them here.

Thanks again for the help.

Best regards / Cordialmente,

--
William Oquendo
Phd Candidate
Simulation Of Physical Systems Group
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Linux User # 321481
*********************
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estos caracteres. Presento excusas por eso.

*********************



On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 10:11 AM, Eric E. Monson <emonson at cs.duke.edu>wrote:

> Hey William,
>
> Have you included the "connectivity structure" explicitly in the data
> you're visualizing (as edges between the grain centers), or is your data
> really a bunch of vertices with the connectivity embedded in a vector
> attribute at each vertex? If the contact "lines" are really part of the data
> then you can probably use a Tube filter which scales its size (radius) with
> a scalar value.
>
> If the "lines" are only included as vector data on the points then it might
> be more challenging since the Glyph filter scales in all three directions
> equally according to your vector or scalar magnitude (except in
> vector_components mode). At one point I made a modified version of the
> vtkGlyph3D filter as a ParaView plugin which would only scale the glyph in
> the direction of the vector (with a constant scaling in the other two
> directions) -- it sounds like you would need the opposite: a glyph that
> scaled a constant amount in the direction of the vector and variable
> according to scalar/vector in the other two directions.
>
> Another possibility might be to use color instead of line/tube thickness...
>
> Would you be able to post a sample of your data (vtp file) someplace so
> some of us could play with possibilities?
>
> Talk to you later,
> -Eric
>
>
> On Dec 29, 2010, at 8:50 PM, William Oquendo wrote:
>
> Dear all,
> I am performing Discrete Element Simulations of granular materials. I have
> successfully employed Paraview to visualize the grains and to filter by its
> scalar and vectorial data, printing to vtk xml vtp files. Now, I would like
> to use Paraview to explore the connectivity structure of the contacts, and,
> for instance, to be able to scale/color/etc by normal force magnitude and so
> on. I would like to know what is the best way to represent the contacts
> among particles. In principle, they are "lines" that goes from  the center
> of one particle to the other. Its "width" could be proportional to some
> scalar value, like the normal force** magnitude.
>
> I tried to use lines, and in order to scale to use a glyph. Unfortunately,
> the glyphs are applied to the points of the line. Should I use just points
> and apply a cylinder glyph on them? how can I "orient" the glyph to point
> from center to center? the normal vectors attribute is useful for that?
>
> Thanks for your kind attention, time, and help.
>
> Best regards / Cordialmente,
>
> --
> William Oquendo
> Phd Candidate
> Simulation Of Physical Systems Group
> Universidad Nacional de Colombia
> Linux User # 321481
> *********************
> Este correo puede carecer de tildes o eñes ya que el teclado no contiene
> estos caracteres. Presento excusas por eso.
>
> *********************
>
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