paraview crashes, maybe I am doing something wrong
 

I'm trying to get out something like this:

http://www.cfd-technologies.co.uk/images/f15e-500.jpg

Let's leave the streamlines out for now. I have a case with 4 million cells. I clip the internal mesh. Then I reopen another instance of the case further down in the pipeline and only display the STL surfaces. Anything beyond that causes it to crash. It's also very slow. I am using a Ubuntu VM with 6GB of RAM. I am currently expanding the disk size from 20gb to 40GB. Anything else I can do?

Hi Mihai,

Is your Ubuntu i686 or x86_64? To confirm, run:
If it's i686, it won't matter how much RAM you throw at it, because the maximum amount of RAM any process can use in 32bit is 2GiB.

Given that nowadays ParaView has an internal reader, you can copy the case folder to your real Windows or Mac machine and open any file with the extension "*.foam".

On Windows, open a command line window (run cmd), go into the folder where you have the case and run:The open this file "case.foam" in ParaView. This way you can use all of the RAM that your real machine has.
You can pre-create such a file on Ubuntu by running:
Best regards,
Bruno

I'm using ubuntu on a virtual machine as well on a mac. What I usually do is to set the case directory as a shared folder between my host machine and the guest. This way I can look at the results using paraview on Mac Os X instead of looking at them within the virtual machine.

Be very careful when doing this on Windows + VirtualBox with Ubuntu VM, because it's been known to make the OpenFOAM solver's complain about files.
I'm not really sure in which way the folders were being shared, all I know is that crazy errors appeared. It'll take a while to look for the posts that mention this :(

edit: I searched for it and found the relevant thread and specific post confirming the issue with shared folders: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...tml#post343474

Thank you Bruno, I noticed that indeed…

When you delete a file from the host machine then openFoam complains because some other file is missing or because it cannot write within a certain folder… The only way to solve this is to unmount you shared folder and then to mount it back. I created two aliases to perform these two tasks faster.

I'm on a Mac so that's not a Windows issue only (funny, isnt't it…)

thanks everyone, it works way better under windows. still crashed at some point in time, but farther along :)

Hey guys,

My ParaView 3.12 suddenly froze and I installed ParaView 4.0 to replace it. It seems like the new ParaView does not like one of the stl files I am trying to open. This is the error it keeps giving me:

Does somebody know how to solve this?

Cheers

Greetings Lucas,

It would be useful to know:

1. What exactly happened to your ParaView 3.12.0, for example if you upgraded you're Linux Distribution or installed something else new.
2. Also would be useful how exactly you installed ParaView 4.1.0.
3. What command did you use to run ParaView 4.1.0?

My guess is that your Linux installation is using a non-English user interface. If you do not use the paraFoam script to launch ParaView, then you'll need to run this command before opening ParaView from the command line:
The other possibility is that ParaView is correct in stating that the STL file is incomplete, possibly due to a lack of disk space when you saved the STL file.

Best regards,
Bruno

Hey Bruno,

Thanks for the response. So what happen was that suddenly my ParaView 3.12 stopped to work. With that I mean that I was not able to hit the apply key when I clicked a region of my mesh or a parameter. Same thing happened when trying to open a STL. So I thought I should simply restart the computer. It didn't workout. Another interesting thing that happened was with my clock on the top of the screen that disappeared. I figured it would just be simpler to re-install ParaView by installing the new version of OpenFOAM. Now regardless of the FOAM version I am running I just hit paraFoam in the command line and ParaView 4.0 opens. I personally don't think there is any problem with the STL because I was able to open it on ParaView 3.12 before it crashed. Seems like OpenFOAM has its own life :)

Sorry for the second message but just to clarify the previous one. My ParaView 3.12 did not crash because I was trying to open the STL file. I was able to open the STL but the apply key froze. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Cheers

Lucas

Hi Lucas,

The disappearance of the clock and other controls on the top right is one of those crazy bugs that easily occur in Ubuntu+Gnome. I have yet to understand why it happens.

The remaining description seems to be related to a possible update made to the system. This would easily happen if for example you had updated Ubuntu 13.10 to 14.04.
The other possibility is if the graphics card drivers had been updated.

As for the problem with the STL file, here are a few questions to try and figure out what might be the problem:

1. If you run the following command, what does it give you?
   
   Code:

   ---

   which paraview

   ---

2. And what about this command:
   
   Code:

   ---

   type paraFoam

   ---

3. And if you run the following commands, are you able to open the STL file from within ParaView without any problems?
   
   Code:

   ---

   export LC_ALL=C
paraview

   ---

Best regards,
Bruno

PS: Forum members can edit their own posts within a period of 30 days of originally posting them ;)

Hey Bruno,

Thanks for letting me know about editing in the forum. I have followed your advice and this is what the terminal give me:

Output
Output**
**What is that supposed to mean?

Output
It turns out that the code crash and the following is output (it is very long):
Cheers!

Lucas

Bruno,

It seems that ParaView crashes whenever the ASCII STL file lacks a filenmane for the endsolid. For instance, I notice that in this particular case my STL file contained:

The correct way is supposed to be:

Cheers,

Lucas

Hi Lucas,

Sorry, I didn't manage to look into this any sooner. And many thanks for sharing the solution you've found!

And your solution has now reminded me that Tobi had posted a nearly identical question several months ago: http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/ope...ascii-stl.html - although the issue back then was with older versions of ParaView... I guess the STL reader in ParaView/VTK is pretty sensitive...

Best regards,
Bruno

Hi,

nice to know Lucas... just one question!
If you using region STL´s so you should define it as follow:

Is that correct or did you try it out?

Hey Tobi

That's correct. Make sure to add the mentioned commands to the regions of every STL before concatenating.

Cheers

Lucas

Hi Lucas,

my experience (interesting) is, that if you name your STL like *.STL you have to write that format:
If you rename the STL into *.stl, it is working without the myName after ensolid like: