ParaView meshio Reader / Writer

Important notice Nico and I both agreed to include this ParaView plugin in the meshio library. It is now done through the PR #667. Hence, this repository is no longer maintained and all future development will be done directly there.

This repository contains a ParaView Python plugin (meshioPlugin.py) that can be loaded by ParaView to read and write all the mesh formats supported by the meshio library.

Installation and updates

If you have downloaded a binary version of ParaView, you may proceed as follows

1. Download the meshio library and put the meshio folder into the site-packages directory of ParaView. For instance, under Windows, it is bin\Lib\site-packages. You need to make sure that ParaView uses a Python version that supports meshio, that is at least Python 3.
2. Download meshioPlugin.py and load the plugin under ParaView, via Tools / Manage Plugins / Load New. You can optionally check the option Auto Load.
3. That's it. You can now load and save almost all meshio-supported mesh formats.

In order that meshio can indeed read all the supported formats, it need several other libraries: lxml, h5py and netCDF4. You can simply proceed like meshio and copy the lxml, h5py and netCDF4 folders from your own Python environment into the site-packages directory.

To ensure that the current plugin is up to date, you may clone this repository and frequently pull the latest updates

git clone https://github.com/tianyikillua/paraview-meshio.git
git pull

Usage

When opening the file, meshio-supported mesh formats are now automatically available through the Open dialog. This means you can now load those that can not be read by ParaView alone

• Gmsh (.msh), so you no longer need the GmshReader plugin
• Abaqus (.inp)
• Nastran (.nas, .fem)
• DOLFIN (.xml)
• and others...see meshio

If point data, cell data and field data are defined in the mesh file, they will be also available in ParaView.

You can also now use the Save Data dialog to convert the current unstructured mesh to another meshio-supported mesh format.

License

meshioPlugin.py is published under the MIT license.