[Paraview] installing pv-meshless plugin for ParaView

[Biddiscombe, John A.]

Yaroslav

I do not support the pv-meshless code any more, there are some branches in the git repo which work with pv4.x but they are all in various stages of experimentation. I am not currently working on particle based simulations so don’t have the time to look after the code. Building paraview from source should be very straightforward (I do not use super build, just standard build using cmake+compiler). The latest pv-meshless code is in the branch openmp but this uses another plugin pv-zoltan which handles the load-balancing (partitioning) for large datasets and that plugin is also in an experimental state (I.e. Not released formally) . The last version of pv-meshless I recall being stable for joe public was tagged for spheric 2012.

JB


From: Yaroslav Vasyliv <vasylivy at gmail.com<mailto:vasylivy at gmail.com>>
Date: Wednesday 13 November 2013 18:12
To: "paraview at paraview.org<mailto:paraview at paraview.org>" <paraview at paraview.org<mailto:paraview at paraview.org>>
Subject: [Paraview] installing pv-meshless plugin for ParaView

Hi All,

I am interested in using the pv-meshless plugin for ParaView to post process SPH data. From what I've read it seems the only way to install a plug-in that is not loaded with ParaView is by building the entire application from the source code. I am under this impression b/c one of the parameters that is needed to be passed to CMake when building pv-meshless is the directory folder "paraview/build" where it looks for other CMakeLists for the paraview application. The problem is if you install paraview from the binaries there is no paraview/build directory so CMake complains. Basically I am not sure how to properly install an unsupported plug-in for ParaView. My background with software/programming is mostly limited to Java & Eclipse IDE. I'd like to think it would have been as simple as downloading a dll file for the plugin and pointing ParaView to find the correct dll file. But I am guessing ParaView doesn't magically support plug-ins  besides default ones. I would have thought pv-meshless would have been a supported plug-in in the recent binary distribution but I guess it is not. :(

Yesterday I tried building the ParaViewSuperbuild from source  with the following CMake Enable options (I should point out I'm not really sure what options to choose, never used CMake before..But I am guessing the following three components are critical to have a minimally running paraview gui):

ENABLE_paraview
ENABLE_python
ENABLE_qt

I opened the cmake gui from the VS command prompt to auto set correct path variables for various things. I also opened visual studio as the administrator. It took maybe 2-3 hrs + to finish compiling. These are the problems I ran into:


(1) When I open the executable for paraview it failed to find the python27.lib even though I saw that it was built under:

\Build\python\src\python\PCbuild

I added the path to my PATH environment variable and ParaView started up fine.

(2) When I try to open the python shell PV crashes. This is tells me some other executables path  was not set correctly. This is probably an indication of a bigger problem so I am not sure if I compiled PV correctly. Any clue why the path variables weren't set correctly?

(3) it also failed to build ParaView under the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX specified directory..

Also if I anyone can direct me to the list where the ENABLE_Components are described as they relate to ParaView functionality I'd really appreciate it. Also is it quicker to build from source on a UNIX based machine? It mentions building QT is time consuming on windows is it substantially faster on other OS's?

Info:
cmake-2.8.8-win32-x86 (just found out it is recommended to use 2.8.9+ )
Visual Studio 2008, 9.0 Professional Edition
OS: Windows 7 64 bit
Accessing ParaView-Superbuild and appropriate downloads via git


Thanks for any help/tips

Yaro