The motivation for this project came from a need for an easy and efficient way to visualize scientific data. VisIt is a very robust and highly optimized visualization suite. What makes it so popular is its ability to read in such a wide array of model output straight out of the box. It accomplishes this task with what are called VisIT Readers. These are C modules in visit’s source code which translate model data into something visit can understand. Unfortunately, right now there are more data formats that visit can’t read than ones which it can. If someone needs to get their data into visit, they can either write a new reader, or use a visit_writer to create their own data file. Writing a new reader is a serious undertaking. It’s much easier to just use a visit_writer to write out your own new data files.
This is the method behind convert2vtk. The VisIt source code includes a visit_writer.so which can be included in a python script and used to write out vtk files. Convert2VTK is built on top of the visit_writer library and provides modules which read in certain data types and write them all out to VTK format. The best part about this project is how extensible it is. If someone has a particular format that VisIt does not currently understand, and there is no module in the Convert2VTK project, they can add their own in the modules folder.
The current modules support conversion of the following model data:
There is a prototype for converting Hycom Binary data which is not yet fully functional.