Hey there,
It’s Robin from CFD Engine & it’s a ParaView two-for-one special today.
I’ve got some browser-based ParaView projects to share AND I’ll try to clear up some of the confusion around using ParaView with different OpenFOAM releases 🙏
Let’s tackle the confusion first…
paraFoam?
I’ve seen (& had) several conversations that revealed some confusion (& frustration) with how the two main OpenFOAM releases approach ParaView.
Some background:
If you install the Foundation OpenFOAM binaries, you also get their custom ParaView build, which includes their custom OpenFOAM reader plugin. You type paraFoam when you want to launch ParaView & it uses their reader plugin & ParaView build 👍
By contrast, recent ESI/OpenCFD versions, do not ship with ParaView. Instead, you’re free to grab your favourite ParaView version (directly from ParaView) & use its native/builtin OpenFOAM reader. Create an empty file ending in .foam (touch open.foam) in your case directory & read that into ParaView 👍
In addition, the different readers have different features. I had a go at comparing them, but this ESI/OpenCFD comparison table is more concise.
In short, for most users ParaView’s native OpenFOAM reader is a great choice – you don’t need paraFoam any more.
But if you can’t shake the muscle memory of typing paraFoam, then check out the tip at the bottom of this page.
Do you find using ParaView with OpenFOAM trickier than it should be? Is there anything I can help you with? Drop me a note & I’ll see what I can do.
Plenty o’ projects
Leaving the OpenFOAM readers behind – if you have ten mins spare & you like poking around other people’s code, then check out Kitware’s GitHub profile.
They have 180 open-source, simulation & visualisation-related projects to peruse 😲 From established ones, like cmake, VTK & ParaView, to smaller ones that you might not know.
They’re not all live, they’re not all documented, but they’re well worth a browse.
Here are a trio to get you started, all related to visualising data in a browser…
ParaView Glance
The most interesting (IMHO) is ParaView Glance, a browser-based, standalone data viewer.
You can export a scene from ParaView, send it to someone who doesn’t have ParaView & they can open it in their browser & interact with it.
There’s nothing for the other party to download or upload or install & the graphics performance is pretty reasonable (it’s not meant for huge/complex models).
It’s a nice tool to have in your toolkit – I’ve even used it for inspecting OBJs on an iPad 👍
Read more here or take it for a spin here (well worth a bookmark).
ParaView Lite
ParaView Lite is a ParaView client in your browser for connecting to a ParaView server that’s running elsewhere (can be local or remote).
Thanks to that server connection, you can do some of the post-pro ops that you might do in a normal ParaView session. The options are limited, but it’s still quite impressive for a browser.
I can see some use cases for this – demos or teaching perhaps? But it would be really cool to use some API magic to spin up (& connect to) a ParaView server on AWS so you can visualise your AWS-based CFD on any machine 🤔
Trame
This one is a little different – whilst the previous two were ready-to go, Trame is a framework for building-your-own web apps/GUIs that interact with a Python back-end.
It’s probably competing (or at least rubbing shoulders) with some other frameworks in this space (Streamlit & Dash from Plotly) but it does come from the same stable as VTK & ParaView, which might be enough to give it an advantage for us CFD people.
The homepage is a little light on info, but you can find out more here. It also warrants a mention in the Kitware 2022 roadmap so I guess we can expect to see it mature over the next year or so? We shall see 👀
What do you want to know?
I thought about splitting this into two emails – one on paraFoam & one on the projects, but I wasn’t sure which you really wanted to see.
Will you be taking any of the projects I mentioned for a spin? I haven’t even touched on their data management, workflow or HPC projects – maybe I’ll cover some of those in a future email?
Finally, don’t forget to drop me a note if there are any ParaView issues I can help you with, my inbox is always open 🙏
Until next week, stay safe.
