[vtkusers] Render a Nastran Model

[Marco Nawijn]

Hi Nelson,

I have some experience with this, so maybe I can help you. The way I
approached this is the following. I have created a Nastran BDF reader
that directly generates a vtkUnstructuredGrid object. It currently
supports most of Nastran cell types. Adding a new one is
straightforward. During reading, property and cell ids are stored as
cell data, so you can visualize them in Paraview. Ofcourse you also
want to view the displacement and strain results. I currently create
report files in Patran (ASCII) for this. The report file stores
node/cell ids and the corresponding data. These can easily be
associated to the grid. I finally save the vtkUnstructuredGrid in a
.vtu file which can be read with Paraview. Obviously, it would be nice
to have a Nastran reader directly implemented in VTK/Paraview, but for
me this is not feasible at the moment. If you think about this option
you should also consider buying the MSC Nastran development kit. This
allows you to directly access the XDB file, which makes life so much
easier.

One final note. I have programmed the above all in Python with the
help of the VTK Python bindings. I have used it on Nastran models up
to 1.000.000 cells without too much difficulty. Once the data is
converted, Paraview completely outperformes Patran when it comes to
post-processing.

Kind regards,

Marco

On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 9:02 AM, Nelson <gnjoseph at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi All, I am trying to render a Nastran file using VTK. I am just using
> vtkQuad class and vtkUnstructuredGrid, but I am unable to render. Which is
> the right class to start to render the Nastran model? Thanks in Advance.
> Regards,
> Nelson
>
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