[Paraview] Visualization of strata in ParaView

[Samuel Key]

Welcome to ParaView Steve,

Everybody was a noob when they first tried to use ParaView, but the more 
you use ParaView, the smarter it gets.

Now, to your question about displaying a geological stratigraphy in 
ParaView, assuming that you have surfaces (of some sort, but preferably 
cell boundaries) at the material interfaces and that you have cells 
containing a datum item that is a number from a monotone sequence, the 
following is a possibility:

(1) Load and display your mesh in ParaView. ("Load and display" is an 
overloaded phrase, that is, you need to have a 2-D or 3-D geometric grid 
of points and cells that is in a file format that ParaView can read.)

(2) Select the cell-variable "Material-Number" (or whatever name you 
supplied with the material data for the cells like MatID, MatNo, ...) 
For void or unknown material regions you can have two choices, a real 
low number (say, -999) and a real high number (say, 999)

(3) The default color bar will appear along with a panel named Color Map 
Editor. Button number #2 allows you to set the lower and upper color 
range values you want to use. Below the color map you have the option of 
selecting a color for below range data and a color for above-range data.

(4) As a last step, button #6 (a yellow folder icon overlaid with a red 
heart) lets you select the color bar you prefer. In your case, go to the 
very bottom of the Preset Color Scales where you will find a color scale 
named "blot" (The blot color scale is a set of, for want of a better 
word, distinct colors.) It is a historic color scale that was widely 
used in the early days of 2-D contour plotting where the contour levels 
were at the color boundaries.

Historically, if more than 7 contours were used, the color sequence 
repeated. I don't know what ParaView will do if you have more than six 
distinct geologic layers.

I could easily imagine that you could outgrow the above approach, but 
maybe it will help to get you started with ParaView.

Enjoy,

Samuel W. Key
FMA Development, LLC
1005 39th Ave NE
Great Falls, Montana 59404


On 6/15/2016 7:36 AM, Steve Lamont wrote:
> Before starting, I should state that I'm a complete noob to ParaView, 
> having only worked with it for a couple of weeks, so if this is a FAQ, 
> I will be humbly abashed if pointed to somewhere rather obvious.
>
> I have a dataset which is somewhat different than those which I 
> believe are normally visualized with ParaView.  It is of geological 
> strata and the samples are of discrete layers, rather than samples of 
> some continuous function.  Furthermore, there are missing data or void 
> regions.
>
> I would like to display cross sections of these data showing the 
> layers without color interpolation.  Is there a way to tell ParaView 
> to display the colors in a step function rather than as a "continuous 
> tone?"
>
> Also, is there a way to tell ParaView to display the missing data as 
> completely transparent -- in other words, setting the NaN color to 
> having an opacity of zero?
>
> Thanks for your attention and helpful RTFMs.
>
> Regards.
>
>                             spl
>
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