ParaView
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| ParaView | |
| Developer: | Kitware Inc. |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 2.4.4 |
| OS: | Unix/Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows |
| Use: | Scientific visualization, Interactive visualization |
| License: | BSD-like |
| Website: | www.paraview.org |
ParaView is an open source, freely available program for parallel, interactive, scientific visualization. It has a client-server architecture to facilitate remote visualization of datasets, and generates level of detail (LOD) models to maintain interactive framerates for large datasets. It is an application built on top of the Visualization Tool Kit (VTK) libraries. Where VTK is a set of libraries that provide visualization services for data, task, and pipeline parallelism, ParaView is an application and was designed solely for data parallelism.
ParaView can perform parallel rendering, although for small datasets it transfers data to the client for rendering by default. ParaView provides many tools for scientific visualization but the most commonly-used are
- isocontouring: finding curves or surfaces in space where a function takes on a single value,
- clipping: removing some spatial region from a dataset,
- cutting: intersecting a dataset with another (usually lower-dimensional) curve or surface,
- volume rendering: drawing a scalar function defined over a volumetric region of space with some translucent appearance so that the interior of the dataset can be observed,
- thresholding: removing some region of a dataset based on the value of a function defined over space,
- Subsetting: removing data to reduce its size with minimal impact on its visual appearance (this is most commonly used for structured grids), and
- picking: selecting a single point or cell in order to inspect function values associated with it.
Although it was initially intended mainly for use with unstructured grids, ParaView can represent data in structured grids.
