Paraview

Tricks for Using Paraview

The SLAC Toolbox

The SLAC Toolbox is an extra toolbar added into paraview. Its purpose is to accelerate workflow by minimizing gui interaction for commonly performed tasks. Everything done via the SLAC Toolbar can also be done via the normal ParaView GUI.

When paraview first comes up, click the SLAC Folder in the toolbar. This has places to enter the name of the mesh, and optionally, the name(s) of field files and/or particle files. On hitting "OK", the other icons in the toolbar become active, if their corresponding data has been loaded (e.g., the "e" and "b" field icons will become active if fields are loaded, but will remain greyed out if no fields were specified).

For mesh viewing (independent of whether fields and/or particles are loaded), these three buttons change how the mesh is displayed. The "Show Mesh as Solid Surface" button shows the mesh surface as an opaque surface. The "Show Mesh as Solid with Wireframe" button shows the surface along with element edges rendered in black. The "Show Wireframe Front and Solid Back" button is a view dependent drawing style; the outward oriented faces are shown as wireframe, while the inward oriented faces are shown as a solid surface. This way, no matter how the mesh is oriented on the screen, you can look through the outer surface to see details inside.

For looking at fields (once they have been loaded), the "e" and "b" buttons in the SLAC Toolbox display pseudocolored electric and magnetic field magnitudes (respectively) on the mesh surface.

To see particles once they have been loaded, pressing the "Toggle Show Particles" button will toggle the display of particles. Particles should always be inside the mesh, so they may not be visible unless the mesh is displayed using the "Show Wireframe Front and Solid Back" style. Particles are rendered as white dots.

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.

Resampling Volume Data to a Planar Uniform Rectilinear Grid

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 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 resampled data is to be exported, so make sure that only the resample filter is active and visible in the Pipeline Broweser, 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.)

Boundary Selection and Identification

Improved Particle Display and Particle Paths

Finding a Mesh Node's Id and XYZ Location

Improved Display of Curved Elements

The first method is to load the surface midpoints by clicking "Read Midpoints".

The other method is to use averaged surface normal.

1. Load internal volume by click "Read Internal Volume" and Apply.
2. Hide the "External Surface" by clicking on the eye icon to it's left in the Pipeline Browser.
3. Select the "Internal Volume" in the Pipeline Browser.
4. Apply "Filter -> Alphabetical -> Extract Surface"
5. Then filter the extracted surface "Filter -> Alphabetical -> General Surface Normal"
6. Adjust the "Feature Angle" property if sharp creases appear in areas which should be smooth, or vice versa.

A third approach combines the first two. Generating surface normals when midpoints are loaded produces better results than either approach alone.