CFD Online Discussion Forums - [General] Paraview nice animation

Hi all!

I'm not sure this is the good section to post in but the nearest from paraview was the paraFOAM section... or this one.

Background
I'm currently working on some kind of fluid motion problem. The whole preprocessing and solving parts went very well. And now it's time for postprocessing: the results are just great. Paraview calculated everything I needed and the pictures are nice to share with other people working on computer simulation.

But, soon I've got a meeting with my management team and sometime, a good picture is worth a thousand word. And a good animation is also worth a thousand picture (and even more if I want something smooth ;)). The thing is I don't find paraview's animation very appealing and I wanted to enhance a bit the quality. This is not something I need but that might be a real plus as a conclusion of the study to show very nice pictures.

Idea
The first idea was to generate .pov files for each of my timestep (I work in transient). Of course, I wouldn't do it manually so I wrote a very simple script: open the case, extract interesting parts and export as .pov.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

from paraview.simple import *

Solver_trace_case = EnSightReader( CaseFileName='somewhere' )



RenderView = GetRenderView()



RenderView.CameraPosition = [0.045000001788139343, 0.0, 0.30116827205415048]

RenderView.CameraClippingRange = [0.26830266634811484, 0.34327460236181229]

RenderView.CameraFocalPoint = [0.045000001788139343, 0.0, -3.92179936170578e-06]

RenderView.CenterOfRotation = [0.045000001788139343, 0.0, -3.92179936170578e-06]



ExtractBlock = ExtractBlock()



ExtractBlock.BlockIndices = [3, 6]



DataRepresentation = GetDisplayProperties(ExtractBlock)

DataRepresentation.Representation = 'Surface'

DataRepresentation.DiffuseColor = [0.51372549019607838, 0.51372549019607838, 0.51372549019607838]



RenderView.CameraParallelScale = 0.036363830255578364

RenderView.Background = [0.33333333333333331, 0.66666666666666663, 1.0]

RenderView.Background2 = [0.0, 0.0, 0.17254901960784313]

DataRepresentation.Representation = 'Surface'

DataRepresentation.EdgeColor = [0.0, 0.0, 0.50000762951094835]

RenderView.CameraParallelScale = 0.036363830255578364

exporters = servermanager.createModule("exporters")



for n in range(0,30):

    n=float(n)/2

    RenderView.ViewTime = n

    view=Render()

    exporters.VRMLExporter(View=view, FileName="somewhereelse/foo-%s.vrml" % str(int(n*10))).Write()

    exporters.POVExporter(View=view, FileName="somewhereelse/foo-%s.pov" % str(int(n*10))).Write()

I'm not an expert at all with paraview python API. (Please no comment on the evil ugly trick to set non integer view times :), this was just to build a quick thing without losing time searching the doc for it).

The problem is that the exported file is not nice at all (when generated using povray foo0.pov +Q3 +A0.01 +AM2 +FN16 +H802 +W1053, which should be very nice). And if I try to generate the .pov file directly in paraview, I got something much nicer.

Just to explain a bit more what I mean for the .pov's files generated by the script: straight lines are not necessary straight anymore once generated. The geometry is completely broken. As for the pov's files generated in pv GUI, everything is OK (except that I won't open each single file manually to export them).

As you can see in the script, I also tried to export as vrml to be used in blender. The output is also really nice, but I don't know a single thing about blender scripting: once again, I won't process each file manually.

My last idea is to use animation capabilities of paraview but with manta renderer. But it's still compiling, so I won't have results very soon.

Questions
Did one of you already tried to get nicer pictures/animations from paraview?
Does anyone know why the povray exporter is apparently not working as it should?
Did someone already tried paraview with manta ?

Many thanks in advance for you answer!