Saving Results

ParaView has several options for saving its results. This simplest is just saving an image. This option is accessible through the file menu's "Save Image" entry.

The menu entry brings up the save-image dialog which allows the user to select a directory, file name and file type for the image. There are several options for image formats including:

Windows Bitmap (.bmp)

JPEG Image (.jpg)

Portable Network Graphics (.png)

Binary PPM (.ppm)

TIFF Image (.tif)

Saving DataSets

You can also save the current data set in geometry files using the "Save Data" under the file menu.

There are currently only two file formats available for saving data sets: VTK and PVTK. The VTK file format is used when running on a single process. The PVTK format is used when ParaView is using two or more processes.

The VTK file format has the .vtk extesion. It is the standard VTK format that can contain all of the VTK data sets including:

vtkStructuredGrid,

vtkUnstructuredGrid,

vtkPolyData,

vtkImageData,

and vtkRectilinearGrid.

When using VTK, the classes vtkDataSetReader and vtkDataWriter will read and write this format.

The PVTK file format is a parallel extension of the VTK file format. Each process saves a VTK file, and a PVTK file is created to associate all of the separate VTK files. Although the PVTK file has to be on a file system visible to all the processes, the individual VTK piece files only need to be accessible to the processes that will read them.

When using VTK, the classes vtkPDataSetReader and vtkPDataSetWriter can be used to read and write the PVTK format. The vtkPDataSetReader can handle the M to N conversion if you have less processors than pieces. If you have more processes than pieces, then some processes will not load any data, and the processing of the data set will not be load balanced.

Last modified: Mon Dec 3 13:19:36 EST 2001