User Manual for SHP Reader Plugin with ParaView
First, get the official ParaView binary release from ParaView's website. The delivered SPH Reader Plugin is built with 32-bit ParaView3.8 on Windows, so it will work only with 32-bit ParaView3.8 on Windows; on Linux, it is built against 64-bit ParaView3.8, so it will only work with 64-bit ParaView3.8 on Linux:
http://www.paraview.org/paraview/resources/software.html
There is a Paraview Wiki page which is very helpful for all aspects of Paraview.
http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView
Install Paraview3.8 on both the server machines and client machines. The same machine can be used to demo client server mode of Paraview, which will be explained later.
The procedure to run SHP Plugin with Paraview in a client-server mode is as follows:
1. Start pvserver. You need a console window to do this. Go to the directory containing the pvserver.exe, which should be the same directory where you installed Paraview binary, and type
pvserver
The Paraview server is now started, and waiting for client. Once a ParaView client is connected to this server (described later in this document), a new line will show as "Client connected." in the console window. You can start the pvserver on a remote machine, and start the Paraview client on a local machine, or you can also start both pvserver and paraview client on your local machine, which means you are using localhost as server.
2. Connect server. Of course you can run Paraview just as a stand-alone desktop application without connecting to any server, which means you are doing everything on client machine.
To connect to a server, do the following: First launch the server dialog.
On the server dialog you can Add/Edit/Delete servers etc ... We will start with adding new server by clicking "Add Server" button.
On this new server dialog, type in server Name, Server Type, Host, Port. The main thing here is the Host, for a remote machine you want to use the IP address of that machine, and for local machine, just use localhost. After all the server information is set, click Configure, which will popup another dialog
On this dialog, select Manual from the Startup Type dropdown.
Once the server is added, it will be automatically populated when you launch the Choose Server dialog again , so that you can just select that server and click on "Connect" button. Now if everything works, the pvserver console window should display a new line: Client connected.
3. Remote Settings. Paraview allows configuration of tasks between client and server, so for the server to do most of the rendering, the settings need to be configured. First, start the settings dialog.
Now, from the list box on the Settings dialog's left, select "Server" under "Render View", you will see what can be modified on the right. Check the "Remote Render Threshold" check box, and move the slider all the way to the left, so that the server will do all the actual rendering. When you click "OK" on this dialog, you should see a new render window popup on the server. This setting will be remembered next time you start ParaView, so you don't have to do this every time Paraview is launched.
4. Load SHP Reader Plugin. Now we are ready to load the SHP reader plugin into ParaView.
The plugin Manager dialog will popup that allows you to manage all the plugins. For the very first time, the SHP plugin binary has to be load manually, and to run in a server-client mode, the plugin has to be loaded on both server and client, so from the Plugin Manager dialog, click on "Load New ..." on both left (remote) and right (local), and load the plugin respectively.
Once SHP plugin is loaded on both server and client, you should see the plugin shown as Loaded in the Plugin Manager dialog.
Now you can set the SHP plugin to be automatically loaded next time ParaView is started by checking the "Auto Load" check box as above picture shown. You need to do this for both server and client.
5. Open SHP File. Once the SHP plugin is loaded, you can load shp files through regular file open dialog in Paraview, and you should see the D3D Files(.shp) extension as one of the file types on the file open dialog. Now select a .shp file.
Then, click on the "Apply" button on the left panel of Paraview.
The file may take a little time to load into PavaView, and once it is loaded, you should see an Outline representation (default of Paraview) of the data in both server and client render window.
6. View Data. Once the data is loaded into Paraview, for shp file, you want to change the representation to Surface,
Then, selected the "Color By" array to be "grainid"
Now you get the familiar look of the shp file.
7. Data Analysis Tools. Here is just a quick example on many things you can do with your data in Paraview. Selected "Slice" Representation and go the bottom half of the left GUI panel, switch to "Display" tab of the Object Inspector. You do slice through the data by dragging the slider for within Slice group on the GUI. You can also run filters, do selections, extract subsets on the data, and you may want to take a look at ParaView tutorial to explore all the modules in ParaView.
http://paraview.org/Wiki/The_ParaView_Tutorial