Documentation

The ParaView Visualizer is a Web application that enables scientific visualization on the Web using a ParaView backend for data processing and rendering.

If you encounter any problems when using ParaView Visualizer, you can find the solutions in Troubleshooting or ask us on GitHub or Mailing list.

What is ParaView Visualizer?

ParaView Visualizer is a standalone application that leverages ParaView capabilities on the backend to produce interactive visualizations over the Web. The Visualizer application can be used locally as a command line tool (demo-mode) or remotely when properly deployed.

The ParaViewWeb Visualizer aims to provide a ParaView-like application for your browser.

Run it from ParaView

ParaView already come with Visualizer and allow you to run it from the command line. Therefore it is not really needed to install anything. Please find below how you can start a local web server to try it out.

ParaView 5.13 along with newer versions of ParaView are removing the bundling of any Web applications. Therefore that section is only relevant for ParaView older than 5.13. You can refer to the blog Exposing Web applications with ParaView 5.13 is getting simpler to learn more.

$ cd paraview.app/Contents
$ ./bin/pvpython                \
    -m paraview.apps.visualizer  \
    --data $PWD/data               \
    --port 8080

==> Open your browser to http://localhost:8080/
$ cd ParaView-5.10.0-Linux-64bit
$ ./bin/pvpython                    \
    -m paraview.apps.visualizer      \
    --data $PWD/data                  \
    --port 8080

==> Open your browser to http://localhost:8080/
$ cd ParaView-5.10.0-Windows-64bit
$ .\bin\pvpython.exe               \
   -m paraview.apps.visualizer      \
   --data "C:\...full_path...\data"  \
   --port 8080

==> Open your browser to http://localhost:8080/

Installation

It only takes few minutes to set up ParaView Visualizer. If you encounter a problem and can’t find the solution here, please submit a GitHub issue.

ParaView Visualizer requires ParaView 5.2+ which can be downloaded here. ParaView bundles the ParaView Visualizer application.

Although using ParaView Visualizer from the command line via Node and NPM could be easier for trying it out.

In order to install and execute the Visualizer application on your system from your command line environment, just run the following commands assuming Node is available on your system:

$ npm install -g pvw-visualizer
$ Visualizer --paraview /Applications/paraview.app --data ~/Desktop

For production usage, ParaView Visualizer should be deployed within your Web infrastructure following the proper requirements:

1) Serve the Visualizer application to the client (Static content: JS + HTML) using any kind of Web server (Apache, Nginx, Tomcat, Node…).
2) Enable the client to start a new ParaView process on the server side (Cluster). We provide a generic launcher implementation using Python which could be replaced with something more appropriate to your infrastructure.
3) Configure your network to forward the WebSocket connection to the proper backend host running the ParaView server.

For better rendering performance, the ParaView server should run on a GPU machine.

Addition information on alternate setups are available here:

Requirements

Installing ParaView Visualizer as a dependency inside your Web project is quite easy. However, you do need to have a couple of other things installed first:

If your computer already has these, congratulations! Just install ParaViewWeb Visualizer with npm:

$ npm install pvw-visualizer --save

If not, please follow the following instructions to install all the requirements.

For Mac users

You may encounter some problems when compiling. Please install Xcode from the App Store first. After Xcode is installed, open Xcode and go to Preferences -> Download -> Command Line Tools -> Install to install command line tools.

Install Git

  • Windows: Download & install git.
  • Mac: Install it with Homebrew, MacPorts or installer.
  • Linux (Ubuntu, Debian): sudo apt-get install git-core
  • Linux (Fedora, Red Hat, CentOS): sudo yum install git-core

Install Node.js

The best way to install Node.js is with nvm.

Once nvm is installed, restart the terminal and run the following command to install Node.js.

$ nvm install 6

Alternatively, download and run node.

Install pvw-visualizer

This is useful if you want to embed Visualizer within your own application or just use some Visualizer components.

$ npm install pvw-visualizer --save

Getting pvw-visualizer source code for contributing

$ git clone https://github.com/kitware/visualizer.git
$ cd visualizer
$ npm install
$ npm link
$ Visualizer [...]
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