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To create a line plot of the current field along the z axis, press the "Make a plot of the field along the Z axis" button. The field type for the plot will be the same as the displayed field type.

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field along the Z axis" button. The field type for the plot will be the same as the displayed field type.

Macros

When new toolbar features are being developed, prototyped, and tested, we use ParaView's python macros. For CW11, several macros were in place on the euclid cluster. These are not quite ready to run on a standalone installation of ParaView. They will be made available here when ready for release. The current macros are:

• nextmode (cycles through multiple frequency domain mode files for a common mesh) (this one may be ready by roughly October 25, 2011.)
• wakeplot (waiting on good way to ask user for input filename)
• timeFFT (waiting on good way to ask user for input filename)
• resonant (waiting on good way to ask user for input filename)
• sparam (this one requires more work and will likely take longest to appear here)

There are 2 ways to install a macro:

Macro Installation via the ParaView GUI

• download the macro of interest to a known directory. It is a python file, so it should be called yourmacroname.py. In ParaView, click "Macros" -> "Add New Macro", then browse to yourmacroname.py in your known directory and hit "Ok".
• on running (or reloading) ParaView, the you should see yourmacroname (without the ".py" suffix) in one of the macro toolbars. Clicking the macro name will run the macro.

Macro Installation by copying files

• ParaView stores macros in one of two places, depending on your operating system. In windows, it's "%APPDATA%/ParaView/Macros". For all other operating systems, it's "~/.config/ParaView/Macros". For windows users, one way to find out where "%APPDATA%" really is, is to run paraview, then "Tools" -> "Python Shell". Within the python shell, type "import os; print os.environ['APPDATA']".
• You can then install a macro by copying it's file into the appropriate ParaView/Macros directory for your operating system.
• on running (or reloading) ParaView, the you should see yourmacroname (without the ".py" suffix) in one of the macro toolbars. Clicking the macro name will run the macro.

Common Tasks

Save a Movie/Animation

Quick and dirty approach:

1. get things to look the way you want onscreen
2. "File -> Save Animation", accept the defaults, and hit "Save Animation"
3. for File Name, enter the base portion of a frame name "frame", for example.
4. set the type to .png (<-- This is important; other formats will burn disk space or butcher your image quality.)
5. Hit OK.
6. Encode your frames into a movie (using the encode.py script for a plays-on-linux-only x264 movie, or quicktime H.264 for a portable movie) High Quality Movie Encoding

High quality approach:

1. Please see the full writeup here: How to Make Movies with ParaView

1. Setup
   1. Load your data (mesh, fields and/or particles), and get them to look the way you want
   2. preview your animation using the VCR style controls in the VCR Toolbar ("View -> Toolbars -> VCR Controls" if not already visible)
   3. For your images, figure out your desired resolution and aspect ratio (aspect = pixel_width/pixel_height).
      1. Here is some information on Choosing Frame Resolution. Please read and understand that before proceeding.
      2. It may help to lock your view to that ratio ("Tools -> Lock View Size Custom...")
   4. It helps to see the Animation View ("View -> Animation View" if it's not already visible)

Uniform Grid of Cones

1. Create a Plane Glyph as described in "Re-sampling Volume Data to a Planar Uniform Rectilinear Grid", but skip the Save Data step
2. select the Plane Glyph in the Pipeline Browser
3. apply the Glyph filter
   1. "Filters -> Alphabetical -> Glyph" (or skip the menus and just hit the glyph icon)
   2. Set Vectors to the field you want to show (defaults to efield)
   3. Set "Gyph Type" to "Cone"
   4. Deselect "Masked Points"
   5. Accept other defaults. Hit the green "Apply" button. Note: cones will probably be the wrong scale at this point.
   6. Scale the cones by checking "Edit", and adjust the scale factor (usually down by an order of magnitude or so).
   7. Remember to hit "Apply" each time after adjusting the scale value.
   8. If, in the Pipeline Browser, the PlaneGlyphs was not automatically hidden when Glyphs was created, hide it.
4. Finishing touches
   1. The cones tend to look better when they are skinnier. Try setting radius to roughly 0.2
   2. If the visualization results are to be published or shown to others, the cones look much better at resolution 12 to 18 or so.

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1. go to http://www.paraview.org/files/v3.8/ and download the appropriate "ParaView-3.8.0-RC1" for your platform. It must be 3.8.0, and must be RC1, because that is what matches what is already installed on lens. Install this client on your system.
2. save a copy of lens.pvsc on your machine as well.
   • (If your username on your local machine does not match your username on lens, edit the lens.pvsc file, change
     • <Argument value="lens.ccs.ornl.gov"/> to include your lens username:
     • <Argument value=username@lens.ccs.ornl.gov"\> and change
     • <Server name="Lens" resource .... to
     • <Server name="Lens-Username" resource ... FIXME (left off here)
3. run ParaView 3.8.0-RC1 on your machine
4. Configure your local plugins.
   1. Tools -> Manage Plugins
      1. Under "Local Plugins", select "SLACTools" and hit "Load Selected" if it's not already loaded. Also, click the grep triangle next to "SLACTools" to expand a menu, and make sure "Auto Load" is checked so that you don't have to repeat this every time you run ParaView.
      2. You may want to do the same for "CSCS_PointSpritePlugin", which is useful particle visualization (though it doesn't presently work on Mac).
5. connect to lens
   1. Press the "Connect" button in the main controls toolbar.
      1. press the "Load Servers" button.
      2. Navigate to your "lens.pvsc" file, select it, and hit "OK".
   2. Under "Choose a Server" you should now see "lens". Select that and hit "Connect".
   3. A dialogue will pop up. The defaults are probably ok. Don't select less than 16 for "Number of Cores", because that makes the X11 server unhappy for some reason. Hit "Connect".
   4. Two more windows should open up, one of which is an X terminal. In it, enter your lens passcode.

Tips and Tricks

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Exporting Slice Data (Re-sampled to a Uniform Rectilinear Grid)

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1. Load the mesh and mode as usual, making sure that "Read Internal Volume" is enabled.
2. Set up an appropriate mesh view.
   1. Hide the External Surface and show the Entire Volume (click the corresponding eye icons).
   2. Set External Surface Entire Volume drawing style to Surface if it isn't already (might default to Outline, which appears as a wireframe box)
   3. Set the surface to display a field you are interested in (so you can know that you will orient the sampling plane correctly)
   4. Select "Entire Volume" so that text is highlighted
3. Create the sampling filter
   1. create the filter: "Filters -> Alphabetical -> Plane Glyphs". This will show a wireframe bounding box and a red outline for the plane orientation.
   2. Position the plane where you want it. The most consistent and repeatable way to do this is to put values in for "Center" and "Normal" which specify a point in the plane and the plane's normal vector, respectively. Change "Resolution" to 100, and hit "Apply"
4. (Optionally) Save the data
   1. Presumably, this re-sampled data is to be exported, so make sure that only the re-sample filter is active and visible in the Pipeline Browser, then
   2. "File -> Save Data", type in a file name, set "Files of Type" to be "CSV" (Comma Separated Values) which is readable by spreadsheets and Matlab. Hit "OK".
   3. For "Configure Writer", you probably don't want to Write All Time Steps. And "Field Association" should be "Points". Hit "OK". (The file should be written to the same directory from which you originally ran ParaView, unless you navigated elsewhere.)

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