BlaBlubbBlog

Silo is a "mesh and field I/O library and scientific database" which VisIt uses to read in data. As such it is an interesting thing for my data, especially for adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) data. I am torn between two options. Option one: Invent my own file format that does what I want and nothing more, though that will require me to write a plugin for VisIt to actually read the data then. Option two: Produce files that VisIt can read directly but hence enforcing a bunch of dependencies on my code.

In either case it is going to be a pain, so to estimate one side of the pain I was going to play around with Silo a bit. But I keep on not finding the sources, so once and for all (until they change the web site) here is the link: Silo.

So I have been playing around with different visualization tools the last few days. Generally, I use gnuplot for all my plotting purposes and it does a great job producing paper grade plots. It even works quite well for just having a quick look at 3D data (like particle distributions et al.) or also 2D scalar fields, like a density field for example.

However, doing really fancy 3D visualization is not its purpose. I have been testing povray for that before and I got a few fancy images. But this does not quite give this immediate feedback of what you are doing: changing the colour mapping requires, naturally, a re-render, which for a decently sized volume data can take a couple of minutes.