Paging VTK experts...

[brep]

Firstly, VTK is an extremely poweful and useful set of visualization tools (

http://www.vtk.org)

and I have a few ideas for using the VTK Python bindings in some cool ABAQUS applications. Basically from within a Python script I will "import vtk" and then go from there...

The problem is that the docs are pretty thin on examples and I'd like to see if anyone else is having success with it.

Specifically, I can already successfully create Delaunay triangulations of unstructured cloud points, but getting anything useful out is another matter. I'd like to be able to return vertex coords, normals and triangle connectivity. (I intend to display the results in the ABAQUS viewport using the new OpenGL-Python API that was added in V6.6EF - once I get the coords it's no problem...)

So, is anyone able to help or have a discussion? If you want to take it offline you can drop me a line at brep07@gmail.com.

 

[xerf]

brep,

I think ABAQUS/CAE has more powerful mesh generation algorithms than VTK.

However, VTK is a nice library, especially because it is free. It is very easy to use with Python. There are two books "Visualization Toolkit An Object-Oriented Approach To 3D Graphics" and "VTK User's Guide" which have some examples, mostly in TCL and C++. The examples can be easily converted to Python.

My major interest related to VTK is to use it in a FE Visual C++/MFC application, mostly for results post-processing.

So far, I could not imagine any good outcome from linking VTK and CAE.

Also, I am curious how many people have interest in both ABAQUS and VTK.

 

[brep]

xerf,

I'm not going to use vtk for meshing per se, as I agree, CAE's capabilities are stronger. On the other hand, there are a lot of nice tools that I am thinking could be used to import stl, remesh (smooth) the facets, perhaps warp them, and then use the node/connectivity info in /CAE.

I have had some success this morning in getting vtk and ABAQUS playing nicely. It is pretty much down to my being at the start of the vtk learning curve. I'd be happy to send a demo script if you're interested in what I've done so far.

 

[xerf]

What VTK version do you use ?

 

[brep]

5.0.0

I use the python package from Enthought which includes vtk, amongst other things...

 

[xerf]

Have CAE ever crashed when using some of the "other things" e.g. plotting modules from scipy ?

 

[brep]

Oh sure In the experimental stages, it is quite easy to get types wrong and send unexpected objects to the wrong place. CAE tries to trap errors as much as possible, but when using these back door methods/modules, there can be loopholes!

 

[xerf]

Actually, CAE crashes during running simple example lines from scipy plotting tutorial.

Some of the vtk examples work some don't and some stop working if you run the same script repeatedly.

Did you use PYTHONPATH to give CAE's Python access to the packages from Enthought?

 

[brep]

Yep, my python path is ammended with this: C:\Python24;C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages