[Paraview] [EXT] Re: Trusses to Tubes

[Dennis Conklin]

David,

Thanks for those suggestions - I actually have only a single diameter in each block due to having only a single set of material properties per block.    So running extract surface and then tube is working very well for me.  I guess I never thought about a "line" element having a surface but apparently that's a line!

Thanks again for the helpful and very speedy reply!

Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: David Thompson [mailto:david.thompson at kitware.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 15, 2015 5:06 PM
To: Dennis Conklin <dennis_conklin at goodyear.com>
Cc: Paraview (paraview at paraview.org) <paraview at paraview.org>
Subject: [EXT] Re: [Paraview] Trusses to Tubes

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