Hey there,
It’s Robin from CFD Engine & it’s time for a new ParaView release 🎉
ParaView v5.11 dropped in mid-November & it’s been my daily driver ever since.
I thought I’d take the chance to share my favourite new features & to encourage you to have a play with it (consider it an amuse-bouche while you wait for OpenFOAM v2212).
Let’s go…
ParaView v5.11
I described the previous ParaView release as a “quality of life” release, one that was full of tweaks that made your day-to-day ParaView usage a little nicer. This new one is the same deal.
There are A LOT of new additions, but there are no new killer features trying to disrupt my workflow and I quite like that 🙏
You can check out the full release notes here, but these are my top nine new features from ParaView v5.11…
Delete This & Downstream Filters
When you right-click on a filter in the pipeline you now have the option to delete all of the other filters that hang off it. No more back-tracking through your pipeline, individually deleting no-longer-needed filters 👍
Memory usage in the status bar
Just a simple green bar at the bottom of the window showing you how much memory you’re using & how much you have left. A nice to have when you’re working with big(ish) models on small(ish) machines.
Preset image sizes
This one is tiny – when you’re next configuring the image files for an animation (or a screenshot) you can choose from a dropdown of preset image sizes. No more Googling the resolution of Full HD 🤓
Expression manager
You can now save your favourite (or most used) calculator expressions – fill them out one time & save them for future use. No more typos, plus you can import, export & share your fantastic formulae with other users. You’ll see the three buttons under the expression field next time you use the Calculator (or Python Calculator) filter.
Node editor
I’ve mentioned the node editor before, back then it was a community contribution, but now it’s a fully-integrated plugin that you can enable via Tools > Manage Plugins.
It gives you an alternative to the pipeline view, that shows your filters etc as connected nodes. I still don’t think it’s particularly useful for building pipelines, but I think it’s a superb option for documenting them.
Check out my previous email on it for more details.
New tutorials
A lot of tutorial content has been added to docs.paraview.org including the notes from a 3-hour class taught at Sandia Labs and a lighter “self-directed” tutorial that walks you through everything you’ll need to get started (& much more).
It even includes a section with CFD-specific examples.
It’s a great place to start if you’re new to ParaView (& still worth a look if you’re an old hand).
Add your logo to charts
There’s been a Logo source for a while, which allowed you to overlay an image file on your 3D plots in order to brand/watermark them. Well, now you can also add it to 2D charts & graphs. Plus you can now specify the window location of your logo, so that it always appears in the bottom-right, for example.
Isometric view button
There’s now a button to switch to an isometric view, a tiny tweak, but surprisingly handy (I’d prefer if it was Z-Up, rather than Y-Up, but that’s just me).
VTK-m
This release introduced me to (another) VTK project: VTK-m which I think is a VTK re-write which exploits GPUs (& other massively parallel processor architectures) to speed things up a bit 🤔
There’s a toggle in preferences (default on - I think) that accelerates a handful of filters (Contour, Cell Data to Point Data, Point Data to Cell Data & Gradient) by using the VTK-m versions. I’ve no idea if they’re meaningfully faster on my workloads &/or on my hardware, but it’s a welcome development.
Give it a go
Switching ParaView versions is a doddle (compared to switching OpenFOAM versions) so why not give it a go?
You can download binaries for Windows, Linux & Mac (including Apple Silicon) from paraview.org and give it a whirl.
If you’re coming from v5.10 you might not feel much difference, but if you’re currently on ParaView v5.6.3 (as bundled with the Foundation releases) then you might find some neat new bits to play with. Let me know what you reckon.
While you’re here, is there’s anything ParaView-related that you’d like to see in future emails – drop me a note.
Until next week, stay safe,
