What is VifPara?

VifPara is an automation framework for ParaView post processing and visualization. It enables batch processing of cases with a straight-forward syntax. It exists to enable automation of large amounts of post-processing steps with possibly multiple cases. VifPara is fully script-driven, which means that it cannot and is not supposed to replace a detailed, manual post-processing workflow of single cases with a graphical user interface.

Architecture

VifPara lives inside an arbitrary Python virtual environment, where it is installed into with pip. Because ParaView (as the visualization backend) comes with its own baked-in Python environment (pvpython), the VifPara venv needs to be connected to the pvpython environment. This connection is automatically handled for you inside a dedicated vifpara runner, which is installed together with the VifPara package. This means when running a VifPara script, call it with vifpara instead of python or python3. This causes the VifPara venv to be integrated into the baked-in environment of the pvpython executable for the duration of the script.

View and View Modifiers

VifPara utilizes ParaView filters, such as Slices, 3D Visualizations, Glyphs, etc. and groups them into building blocks for a visualization strategy.

There are 2 major types of building blocks: Views and View Modifiers.

A view is a a basic filter to structurally visualize a case inside of a cell in your visualization layout. This can be a Slice or a 3D Visualization. View modifers, such as Streamlines, Glyphs, Annotations can then be assigned to the views to display data on top of the base view.