[Paraview] Re: one global structure

[Fabian Braennstroem]

Hi Brad,

* Brad schrieb am 26 Apr 2005:

> Fabian Braennstroem wrote:
> >I have a rectilinear mesh for my problem and want to write
> >out a lot of time steps in different files. This should be
> >no problem to do; I think using 'Collection' I can collect
> >them again; like this example I found:
> >
> >
> >  <VTKFile type="Collection">
> >  <Collection>
> >  <DataSet part="0" file="a_field-part0-{timestepnumber}.vtr"/>
> >  <DataSet part="1" file="a_field-part1-{timestepnumber}.vtr"/>
> >  ...
> >  ...
> >
> >  </Collection>
> >  </VTKFile>
> >
> >My problem is now, that I have to write the structure and
> >mesh data for every time step in every file which will
> >produce a lot of bytes. Is there a way to define the grid
> >and structure of all data-files global in one file, so that
> >the data-files just have data in binary format inside?
> 
> The VTK XML formats were not originally designed with timesteps as a 
> design goal.  Time support may be added but it is not yet implemented. 
> If you want to do this with ParaView you can look at the HDF5 format, 
> which I believe supports single geometry and multiple timesteps of data.

I actually took a look at hdf5, but have problems to read
some examples I found; and none of those working ones did
have any 3D grid include. As I understand it now, hdf5 was
just intendend for 2D stuff. Now, there exist a mesh api,
but because examples did not work I thought that paraview
has problems with this mesh-api and lay my thought about
hdf5/paraview aside.
Am I totally wrong or did you have similar experience with
hdf5 and paraview?

Best Regards!
Fabian