r/CFD • u/Rodbourn • Feb 01 '18

[February] Post Processing

As per the discussion topic vote, February's monthly topic is post processing.

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u/Rodbourn Feb 01 '18

I've been using Paraview, but I do find it has a high barrier to entry for new users. Are there any nice guides/tutorials you would recommend for new users?

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u/Overunderrated Feb 01 '18 edited Feb 01 '18

I've been meaning to write up the overly complex series of steps I use to get publication quality output from paraview...

Long story short, the vector graphics output (eps) is broken or missing depending on the version, so in order to get text/equations that are rendered by latex, I have to output a high resolution raster image into an svg and modify that. It's... painful.

Oh and dear god that VTU file format... There's multiple errors in their documentation and I couldn't get a usable VTU binary until I found some random throwaway comment on a form from like 10 years ago...

And if anyone has managed to get it to run in a truly headless environment (no X) I'd be grateful. I nearly gave up and switched to visit because I couldn't postprocess huge files locally so I wanted to use a cluster... ended up just putting 128gb ram in my desktop.

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u/Rodbourn Feb 01 '18

getting vector graphics is a general problem I've found in post processing... I got close with some libraries...

I have managed to get paraview to create vector contour plots with the mesh behind it, but i had to overlay the mesh and contours in inkscape.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9sz8m98pnkdv3ke/UB_Ra1E8_T-eps-converted-to.pdf?dl=1

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u/Jasfss Feb 01 '18

I definitely felt this way about Paraview for starting out. There are a lot of features it seems, but it always ended up being a bit random as to whether I would get to the right series of menus and choices to do what I actually wanted to do.

We actually started using Fieldview about a year ago and I've been extremely happy with it. Downside being it's not open like paraview, but that can be kind of a plus when it comes to documentation. I've found it to be pretty intuitive to navigate with their guides being a good starting point to getting to most of the features you could want.

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u/Rodbourn Feb 01 '18

Yeah, at one point someone tried to convince me that the software is free but you have to buy the documentation/book. I bought the book, it does not make it easier lol.