Is there interest in dumping directly to VTK file formats?

Hi everyone,

for some time now LIGGGHTS has had a feature to directly dump data into different VTK file formats similar to dump custom. This code was developed by one of my coworkers Daniel Queteschiner. It adds the VTK library (http://www.vtk.org/) as a dependency.

It's quite useful for day-to-day work, avoiding the need to use conversion scripts. Instead these files can be directly processed using tools such as ParaView. It's not a *new* feature per se, but a convenience feature.

I'm wondering if there is interest in the community for a backport for LAMMPS?

E.g., a USER-VTK package perhaps?

Cheers,
Richard

Hi everyone,

for some time now LIGGGHTS has had a feature to directly dump data into
different VTK file formats similar to dump custom. This code was
developed by one of my coworkers Daniel Queteschiner. It adds the VTK
library (http://www.vtk.org/) as a dependency.

It's quite useful for day-to-day work, avoiding the need to use
conversion scripts. Instead these files can be directly processed using
tools such as ParaView. It's not a *new* feature per se, but a
convenience feature.

I'm wondering if there is interest in the community for a backport for
LAMMPS?

according to a quick search through the mailing list archives there
have been about 20 exchanges on this topic in the past 7-8 years.

E.g., a USER-VTK package perhaps?

that would be the way to go. please see the USER-H5MD package as an
example, which adds support for hdf5 formatted trajectory output.
it would also be advisable to follow the format of putting any support
library/wrapper functions and the flags to link to the requires
external library in a lib directory in a similar fashion.

axel.

yes Richard, I think there would be interest.

I assume it would need to be a USER-VTK package

b/c it links against VTK libs you need on your machine?

If so, then a USER package is good.

Steve

I've pushed an initial version of the user package to GitHub:

https://github.com/rbberger/lammps/commits/user-vtk

I'll work on it a bit more after the holidays. It needs some refactoring, there is a lot of duplication going on.

Richard