[Paraview] Trusses to Tubes

[David Thompson]

Hi Dennis,

> I have a Exodus multi-block dataset with some blocks that are truss elements (unstructured grid).    Each truss represents a cord and I would like to run the Tube filter on them to display their actual diameter so that I can check how close they come to touching each other.  Of course, the Tube only runs on lines, not trusses. ...

I can imagine 2 issues at play:

1. One issue may be that the Tube filter expects polydata, not unstructured grids (which is what the Exodus reader generates by default). Running "Extract Surface" on the reader output should let you run the Tube filter on the result.

2. Another issue is that the Exodus reader does not currently read element block attributes, which is normally where truss cross-sectional area is stored. Thus you would have to know the proper radius to pass to the Tube filter.

It would not be a huge amount of work to add Exodus attributes as field data nor to have the reader run a tube filter on truss blocks, but it is more than I have time to do right now. If you want to write a patch, I can point you to where changes would need to be made.

	David