Liu Yu had asked if it is possible to export data from a CAD package such as <a href="http://www.kpovmodeler.org/">kpovmodeller</a> to a visualization package such as Paraview or VisIt.

The answer is yes. Depending on how complicated your scene is, it should be possible parse out the basic elements/objects from your 3d scene (.pov file) and use them as base objects for a simulation or visualization using any of the packages mentioned.

You might need to do some basic data re-formatting/filtering. you can used any kind of combination of home made awk/sed scripting to do this, or even just do it manually.

Furthermore, if you actually wanted to create images, that had further visual correlation between povray (kpovmodeler) and any visualization package, all you have to do is match the camera setup between the two programs. (you may have to do some conversions between the camera descriptions and a camera matrix/projection matrix.)

Hope this helps!

- santiago

liuyu 1565 - days ago

Thanks for the help.
I looked into the pov file generated by kpovmodeler. It is not difficult to understand since they are just markup language. But I do have to learn more about vtk format first before doing any format conversion. Many modelling software (for example, kpovmodeler or, more advanced, blender) can also change the texture, light source and etc. This seems to overlap with some of the functionalities offered by visualization tools. At least for now, the vis packages can do more if the original data has no more information than coordinates. Then one could easily add glyphs and etc.
Please correct me if there is some misunderstanding.

slombey 1565 - days ago

You are totally correct. There is functionality overlap between many of the tools out there. But the ultimate goal of povray, or blender for that matter, is really pretty images. Thus they allow more control of textures, lights, light properties, etc. Visualization packages' goal is to process the data in order to hopefully present some interesting insight. So, while pretty pictures help, for visualization packages the processing of the data is (should be) more important.

If you get some happening image out, do post it here! Good luck!

- santiago

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