Should we make a new viewer based on VTK binary that automatically manages the multiple files and headers etc? Barry On Jul 4, 2011, at 10:06 PM, Jed Brown wrote:
On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 21:44, Barry Smith <[email protected]> wrote: What are the recommended visualization packages for use with PETSc (for example making movies of contour plots and isosurfaces) and what are the recommended data formats to use to save Vecs for visualization?
VisIt and ParaView are the primary choices. In my experience, VisIt is a more complete system, but ParaView is easier to install and probably easier to get started with.
The VTK XML or binary formats are the easiest to get started with. See src/ts/examples/tutorials/ex14.c for an example of writing an XML file containing two fields on different grids (2D and 3D, structured, but deformed) in parallel. All file formats are horrible non-extensible crud, usually grown out of a particular application with structured grids of low-order/non-exotic basis functions on unstructured grids. They tend not to retain enough semantic information to reconstruct a state for further computations and also work for visualization without needing additional application-provided information.