Importing Transient Data into Paraview

1
votes

I have a 3D triangulated surface. Nodes and Conn variables store the coordinates and connectivity of the triangles. At each vertex, a scalar quantity, S, and a vector with three components, V, are stored. These data are time-dependent. Also, my geometry does not change over time and I have one surface for all the timesteps.

How should I approach for writing a VTK file that has the transient data over this surface? In other words, I want to write the value of S and V at different timestep on this 3D surface in a single VTK file. I ultimately want to import this VTK file into Paraview for visualization. vtkTemporalDataSet seems to be the solution for me but I could not find an example on how to write an ASCII or binary file for this VTK class. Could vtkPolyData somehow be used to define time so that Paraview knows the transient nature of my dataset? I would appreciate any help or comment.

1
vtkparaviewgeometry-surface

1 Answers

2
votes

The VTK file format does not support transient data. However, you can write a series of files that ParaView will interpret as a time sequence. This will work fine with poly data in the VTK file. The file series is defined as files of the same name with a number identifier in them. For example, if you have a series of files named:

MyFile_000.vtk
MyFile_001.vtk
MyFile_002.vtk

ParaView will group these files together in its file browser and when you read them together, it will treat them as a file sequence with 3 time steps.

The bad part of this representation is that you will have to replicate the Nodes and Conn in each file. If that is a problem, you will have to use a different file format that supports multiple time steps using the same connection information (such as the Exodus II file format).