[Paraview] Using Paraview for modeling orbital motion of many objects/database connectivity?

[David Thompson]

Hi Cynthia,

It's not something ParaView supports without any modifications, but it is not impossible. VTK, the toolkit ParaView is built upon, provides ways to populate tables from SQL database queries and also ways to turn those tables into polygonal datasets that can be rendered. It would take a small amount of programming to connect those two together into a ParaView pipeline object.

Depending on what's in the database, it would probably also require some filters to turn the satellite ephemera into a time-series of point coordinates for animations. I'm less certain about how much work that would be; I'm not familiar enough with orbital mechanics to know how much work that is.

	Hope that helps,
	David

> On Feb 2, 2016, at 12:26 PM, Hart, Cynthia Joyce - (cyndyb) <cyndyb at email.arizona.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi folks -
> 
> Forgive me if this question is entirely out of scope of Paraview’s capabilities, but I’m new to the software, and still learning what it can and cannot do.  I have a rather large scale project that I have been asked to look into the feasibility of.  It involves a simulation of the display of a multitude of satellite ‘and other’ objects orbiting the Earth, with the correct orbital motions, and in an animated display, no less.  Due to the number of objects, I have the idea in mind that a database of some sort is the best way to store the information of the objects, and have whatever is driving the simulation call on that database.  I have no idea if Paraview could be - or has been - used with a database.  Is this at all do-able with Paraview?  And if not, what do you think I ought to be considering, for something of this scope?  
> 
> Thanks much,
> 
> Cynthia
> 
> 
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