[Paraview] paraview for a "new" application

[Paul Anton Letnes]

Hi, fellow paraviewers!

I’ve spent some time playing with tutorials and user manuals, and so far I’m impressed with what paraview can do.

I am working on a specialized structural engineering program that, mainly, performs simulations of pipes with circular cross sections. Each pipe is split into nodes and 1D elements, and results are reported at points (or, less commonly, elements) along the pipe.

Some results are reported once per cross section; e.g, the tension in the pipe has a single value for the entire cross section. Other results, e.g. plastic strain, is reported for a number of points along the circumference of the pipe (say, 5-50 points), for each of the cross sections. The results can be either “snapshots” or time series.

After what I’ve seen from the paraview documentation, possible approaches include:
1. Create a paraview plugin to read our current in-house file format. 
2. Directly write output files in an already supported format.
3. Write pvpython scripts that perform the conversion on the fly.

Approach 1 is probably a lot of work and the file format is not of interest to anyone else (optimally, I’d like to replace it), so this seems less attractive. Approach 3 is probably less user-friendly for our users.

The second approach seems sensible, but the paraview documentation does not give many examples of how to do this. Optimally, I’d like to write a hdf5-based format (xdmf? netcdf? raw hdf5?) directly from Fortran, but I haven’t found documentation on how to do this. Using hdf5 seems attractive as it’s so widely supported by e.g. matlab, python, and other postprocessing tools used in the industry. Getting a single results database would simplify a lot of workflows!

What would you guys do?

Cheers
Paul