Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Visualization
 

I am writing an SPH code, and I am looking for ways to visualize results. I found H5part, a plugin to paraview is widely used. But to write a output function for that, I would need to use some libraries like H5part and Hdf5. This I believe would make my code really big in that each time I compile it on any machine I will need these libraries installed. Is there a better way of doing this?

I have also found POVray being used. Though I could use it for rendering some solid etc, I have not come across any way I can get particle data rendered. How do people do that? because I see a lot of articles and videos that used POVray to render SPH data.

Thank you.

Have a look at the software package liggghts. Liggghts also creates particle data and people use pizza.py (which comes with liggghts) in order to create vtk files which can be read by paraview. If you are already writing your own code, you can create output according to how pizza.py does it. Alternatively, you can look at the documentation of the vtk format: www.vtk.org/VTK/img/file-formats.pdf

I advice VTK as file format and paraview to visualize results