[mange]

Hi

I think there are many, like myself, who really like the little toolkit OpenDX for data visualization. The problem Is I cannot seem to get it to work with latest OpenFOAM-1.6.

With the 1.5 version i managed to get ahold of source code of a really nice and useful tool called foamToDX which worked very well. The problem is that I cannot compile it with 1.6.

did anyone already solve this?
otherwise some hints or suggestions? I really do not like to start using parafoam

best regards

[mange]

Is this already discussed in a previous post? I did search but found nothing relevant.

come on, there must be more DX users out there.

[dmoroian]

Hi Magnus,
I think the official release of OpenFOAM removed the interface with OpenDX since 1.3 or 1.4.
Only the development version OpenFOAM-dev is still maintaining it so you will have to wait for Hrv and the rest of the contributors to update the svn with 1.6. For the moment the latest development version is OpenFOAM.1.5-dev.
On the other hand, OpenDX doesn't look good at all. Its development has stopped and there is no longer a maintainer to take care of it. However the discussion forum is still active.

Dragos

[mange]

Hi Dragos!! Nice to hear from you

Indeed, I have found that there is not much going on on the DX development front. This is very frustrating but of course we cannot demand anything from an open project like this.

So Dragos, can you recommend another package that can rival the robustness and speed of DX while also being equally versatile and easy to use?

I did try parafoam some versions ago, but it could not really compete with DX. Maybe it has changed for the better now?


/Magnus

[dmoroian]

Hi Magnus,
It is always a pleasure to talk to you even on the discussion forum.
The biggest drawback with OpenDX is that it cannot work with large meshes (something related to 32/64 bit integers - large arena). Another disadvantage is the parallel (distributed or SMP) that, as far as I know, is not implemented for linux platform.
Since the development has stopped, there is no support for polyhedral cells, either.
All these have been overcome by paraview (except maybe the polyhedral support).
On top of that, the OpenFOAM community has written an importer for paraview enabling it to read natively OpenFOAM cases. Paraview also supports a scripting language (python) that makes it very flexible.
What it lacks is the documentation. There is a book about Paraview, written by the developers (if I remember correctly), but is way behind the manuals from OpenDX.


Dragos