[Paraview] Animating a sphere using CSV values

[Peter Morse]

I'm a complete newb to paraview and am after some advice for the following problem:

1] I have a .csv file with wave rider buoy data that measures ocean wave heights (I've made it a very simple one dimensional list of 18,000 values - that displays in a spreadsheet view  with cell values like 1.88, 1.9, 1.97. 1.71... etc)

2] Each cell value has a time stamp associated with it that I would also like to use later, but I'm not worrying about this at the moment (so it can be an arbitrary time step)

3] I want to use the cell value to drive an animation of a sphere such that the cell value determines a height value (Y value) for the sphere (in eg. metres)

4] I want to be able to play the animation over arbitrary time steps so that the sphere simply jitters up and down.


So it's simply passing a parameter from a .csv file to a y parameter for the sphere, moving across time t.

It sounded easy, but I am completely stumped as to how I might do it as I can't seem to connect the .csv cell values to the sphere y value. Of course it is trivial to plot the data, but I don't want to do that here.

Any suggestions as to how I might do this? It seems straightforward in Blender, Quartz composer, Houdini, Processing - i.e. more conventional animation/visualization packages, but Paraview doesn't seem to enable this with any great obviousness.

A python filter? I'm sure I'm missing something blindingly obvious.

Thanks in advance :)

cheers

Peter

PhD Researcher
Computational Geophysics
School of Earth Sciences
University of Tasmania