I'm really impressed by the work you guys currently do on the FEM workbench, such fast progress is awesome! So I thought a bit about possibilities to help out on this.
The current postprocessing (displacement and stress) works with a custom coin3d implementation, but honestly creating all postprocessing like this directly in coin is a tremendous amount of work. The de facto standard toolkit for this in the open source world is vtk (this is what powers paraview). It offers tremendous amounts of data processing power and visualisation capabilities. So why not try to use it for freecad, the philosophy here is reusing of existing stuff. So I came up with a way to use vtk for data processing while doing the visualisation in coin 3d:
- The same dataset with multiple filters. I did not manage to color the hedehog and the streamlines correctly, it's my first day in vtk...
- post.png (308.36 KiB) Viewed 5545 times
The pros:
1. Tremendous possibilities with little effort for postprocessing
2. Unified postprocessing: all tools work with 1D, 2D and 3D data
2. The vtk filter approach can be utilized in freecad the same way as in paraview and hence offers a universal postprocessing tool (think thermal, electromagnetics, fluid...)
3. The filter approach would work very well with our document object structure (compare paraview)
4. State of the art technology used instead of self implemented hard to maintain code
5. Importer and exporter for numerous formats
The cons:
1. Not all vtk visualisation modes can be easily mapped to coin3d, but the most important ones (PolyData) works very well
2. There is overhead n the vtk - coin mapping. But IMHO the speed gain we get from the professional vtk data processing capabilities will outnumber the little transfer overhead
So let me know what you think and if this is useful for you, than we can decide if it is worth to work longer on the integration of vtk.
Stefan
