3D scientific visualization with ParaView

Tuesday, July 13
9 am–5 pm Pacific Time

This course will start at 9am Pacific Time and will run until 5pm Pacific Time. Its format will be a combination of several interactive Zoom sessions and pre-recorded reading and video materials in-between the Zoom sessions. Course materials will be added here shortly before the start of the course.

We will study 3D scientific visualization with ParaView, an open source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization tool designed to run on a variety of hardware from an individual laptop to large supercomputers. With ParaView users can interactively visualize 2D and 3D data sets defined on structured, adaptive and unstructured meshes or particles, animate these datasets in time, and manipulate them with a variety of filters. ParaView supports both interactive (GUI) and scripted (including offscreen) visualization, and is an easy and fun tool to learn.

Instructor: Alex Razoumov (WestGrid)

Prerequisites: This is an introductory course, no prior visualization experience is required.

Software: Please install ParaView on your computer, and make sure you can start it before the course. As of this writing, the latest ParaView version is 5.9.1 – it should work nicely for our workshop. If you want to reproduce the remote visualization client-server demos on Cedar cluster (for which you will need a Compute Canada account), you might want to use ParaView 5.8.1 – this is really optional. We will provide all sample data and codes for the exercises. Let us know before or during the course if you want to load your own dataset into ParaView.

Zoom   9:00am-9:30am Pacific
Morning opening session

On your own
Introduction (28 min)
ParaView architecture and GUI (11 min)
Importing data into ParaView (29 min)
Working with ParaView filters (35 min)

Zoom   11:45am-1:30pm Pacific
Mid-day session

On your own
Exporting scenes (5 min)
Animation in ParaView (14 min)
Python scripting in ParaView (30 min)
Remote and distributed visualization (37 min)
Summary (4 min)

Zoom   3:00pm-5:00pm Pacific
Cover challenges, do some exercises, and wrap up the course.