The ParaView Post-processor

For visualisation of OpenFOAM simulations, we develop a reader module for OpenFOAM data for the open source visualization application ParaView. We then supply a version of ParaView compiled with the OpenFOAM reader module, as additional software to the OpenFOAM distribution, e.g. within a pack named ThirdParty in the source code repository, or as a separate pack in the Ubuntu Deb installation.

ParaView uses the Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) as its data processing and rendering engine and can therefore read any data in VTK format. OpenFOAM includes the foamToVTK utility to convert data from its native format to VTK format, which means that any VTK-based graphics tools can be used to post-process OPENFOAM® cases.

The user therefore has the choice of using the reader module or data converter. Further details about ParaView can be found at http://www.paraview.org