Hi, I agree with Blaise's assessment of ParaView. It is good for quick and dirty visualization, but its scripting interface is very limited.
MayaVi provides a GUI along with high-level API access to VTK data structures through Python. One can update/modify the data values through the API without ever writing VTK compatible files. I read my data from HDF5 files using PyTables and create VTK data objects using the API. A similar mechanism could be used for data stored using SQLite. I think some Linux and Mac packaging systems include MayaVi; I usually build from source. Regards, Brad On 07/05/2011 07:58 AM, Blaise Bourdin wrote: > Hi, > > Let me add to Barry's frustration. I have spent most the last week > trying to render animations of reasonably large computations (about > 25M 3d unstructured elements divided in up to 25,000 exodusII > files). > > - Paraview is simple to get started with in the GUI. In theory, it is > scriptable in python, but there is pretty much no documentation on > the python API, which seems to be a mismatched combination of vtk > calls, and several levels / revisions / versions of paraview > interfaces. It is possible to generate a python trace of gui > interactions, but for some reasons, some actions (image format and > sizes, movies framnerates, for instance) are not recorded. - visit's > gui take a little more time to master, it is also scriptable in > python. The python capture is more readable, and is somewhat > documented (the doc is for 1.4.0, the current version 2.3.0). Movie > generation is a pain and as far as I understand not feasible inside a > python script. Instead, one has to save a session, and reopen it with > the -movie CL interface. - Unless you are willing to rebuild visit or > paraview from source (which is highly non-trivial and poorly > documented), all these package install their own python, so that you > don't have access to all other packages you may have on your system. > I was not able to figure out how to import paraview or visit from my > own python using the binary distributions - EnSight is a good > alternate choice if you can afford it. It is not open and not cheap > but is quite good, reads most major format and has a pretty > responsive support team. Their python scripting is well documented, > but as far as I understand, it is not possible to import ensight from > a python script. Instead, Ensight runs python scripts. > > - About data formats: hdf5 / xdmf seems very well supported, but > again, human-readable documentation on xdmf is lacking. It would be > really nice if one could generate the proper xdmf description and > geometry from a dm of a dmmesh. Would it be also possible to > interface with moab and gain access to all the file formats they > support? > > Finally, I am skeptical about the benefit of implementing yet another > file format that is incompatible with existing analysis, post > processing, and mesh generation tools. > > Blaise