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Export triangulation to Paraview

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Export triangulation to Paraview

by David Gingras

 

06 Jan 2009 (Updated 05 May 2009)

Function to export an unrestricted 2D triangulation to a VTK file which can be open with Paraview.

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Description

Trying to visualize a huge triangulation with trisurf or triplot is often very slow and frustrating. Solution : use Paraview, a very powerful and free 3D data viewer. But it could be complicated to generate the input file specially with binary format. The function proposed takes a 2.5D unrestricted triangulation and generates the ASCII VTK file for Paraview.

function exportTriangulation2VTK(file,XYZ,tri,dir)
Input :
          "dir" is the path of the directory where the file is saved (string). (Optional)
           "file" is the name without extension of the file (string).
           "XYZ" is the coordinate of the vertex of the triangulation (nx3 matrix).
          "tri" is the list of triangles which contain indexes of XYZ (mx3 matrix).

Simple example :
[X,Y,Z]=peaks(25);
X=reshape(X,[],1);
Y=reshape(Y,[],1);
Z=0.4*reshape(Z,[],1);
tri = delaunay(X,Y);
exportTriangulation2VTK('sampleExampleTri',[X Y Z],tri)

Note : If the triangulation doesn't have Z component (a plane), put the third column of XYZ with all zeros. Paraview only deals with 3D object.

MATLAB release MATLAB 7.4 (R2007a)
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Comments and Ratings (2)
15 Aug 2011 Luke

David, I have a 3D point cloud that I am running through delaunay(x,y) on and this generates a nx3 matrix, n being the # of triangulations. I am using this to create a smooth surface in MATLAB that can accurately model the point cloud if it were a volume, not just points. When I load the VTK file into Paraview, the triangulations are not working well and Paraview makes the file look more like a surf plot rather than a triangulation. Any suggestions as to what I am doing wrong?

22 Aug 2011 David Gingras

Hi Luke, exportTriangulation2VTK.m just deals with 3D shell meshes (assembly of triangles not tetrahedra). If you do have a shell mesh and you are not able to export it to Paraview, you can send me your code and I'll see what I can do. Cheers. - David

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Updates
05 May 2009

updated the description

Tag Activity for this File
Tag Applied By Date/Time
2d Cristina McIntire 07 Jan 2009 15:30:50
3d Cristina McIntire 07 Jan 2009 16:04:01
visualization David Gingras 07 Jan 2009 16:04:12
data export David Gingras 07 Jan 2009 16:04:12
paraview David Gingras 07 Jan 2009 16:04:12
vtk David Gingras 07 Jan 2009 16:04:12
triangulation David Gingras 07 Jan 2009 16:04:12
2d Francesco Boselli 02 Feb 2009 09:26:48

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