Hi,

Does anyone have experience with Paraview in comparison with Tecplot?

Is it easy to convert between the file formats of Tecplot and Paraview?

Is Paraview as userfriendly as Tecplot once you know how to work with it?

Or in one question, is it worthwile to change from Tecplot to paraview because it's for free?

Comments are welcome!

Jim

>Is it easy to convert between the file formats of Tecplot and Paraview?

based on my knowledge, no.

>Is Paraview as userfriendly as Tecplot once you know how to work with it?

no

tecplot is more userfriendly and particularly faster (v. 10 is very fast and uses state-of-theart vis. tech.), but paraveiw has its benefits, is more costomizable and extendable plus parallel capability. For a formal post processing i don't see reason for switching from Tecplot to parav.

If you look for a free post processor, GID is an alternative (free for academic use). Particularly, it could read Tecplot ASCII format (it is pre and post processor, but is not as user friendly as Tecplot is)

Well, to be honest it's for commercial use, I didn't figure out yet what the price of Tecplot is, it's for a very small company that's why I asked for some free stuff at first.

I've been working with Tecplot in other (much bigger) companies before and liked it a lot, that's why I asked whether there exists a freeware tool that is as user friendly.

I'll try to convice my boss to find out the price and buy Tecplot, because it seems that Paraview may be hard to learn

Thanks for your answer rt,

Jim

> Paraview may be hard to learn

note that paraview is not hard to learn, i already work with paraveiw it is nice, but at comparison position, without attantion to cost, i select tecplot for formal CFD usage.

An other powerful commercial post-processor is Ensight

Didn't know about Ensight, thanks!

By the way,

Is it actually allowed to use Paraview for commercial purposes?

The programs seems so good to me to be true for being fully free.

Regards,

Jim.

Paraview is indeed a powerful tool. It is built on vtk which makes it very versatile. If you know some vtk, you can extend its power by writing your own programs in C/Java/python.

According to their website, I dont see any restrictions on commercial use

http://paraview.org/New/copyright.html

I've been working with paraview for about a year, and it's not as difficult to learn as it may looks at first sight. Tecplot is more user-friendly for the new user, but you won't take 2 months to learn paraview.

Paraview may be slow, mainly if your data is not in a binary format. However, its pipeline structure is very useful, and allows you to apply a sequence of filters - operations - on your data, then go back at any point of this sequence and modify some parameters, and the change will propagate automatically to the end of the pipeline.

I worked with tecplot also, and I think paraview is at least worth a try. The only costs you'll have will be the manuals, which are not free, but surely cost much less than a tecplot license.

Thank you, I already started with ParaView in the mean time and eh... it's not bad at all, I slowly starting to like it!

I've used both, been using Paraview for 6 months, currently using Paraview 3 cvs, use of qt gui library makes for nice experience. Its a comparable program. Its free. Its a no brainer really. Use Paraview.

Thank you, I indeed chose Paraview!