I am a fan of Paraview and a student of GLVisualize.
In my usecase, I am trying to make and visualize mesh node data, including scalar and vector fields defined over those nodes. Paraview does an excellent job at that using extremely few commands, in the Python API. In that area, I think GLVisualize still has some way to go. I also find Paraview faster. So I would like to suggest to the developers of GLVisualize to see what they can reuse from the Paraview C++ libraries, to bring the best of the two worlds.
Some formats I think would be useful to freely read from and write to in order of priority are: vtk (all variants), pvd, stl, step, obj, and fbx; reading into arrays of mesh element and node structs with their scalar and vector field properties, where applicable. WriteVTK does a great job at writing vtk files, but I don’t know if any similar package exists for reading vtk into arrays of raw data or structs.
1 Like
I’ll let the developers state this to be sure, but I’m not sure this is really part of the objective of GLVisualize. It seems it’s all about building a pure-Julia tool. Because of this herculean task, it’s not as far along in its development as more traditional and standard tools like Paraview, but it’s getting there.
Adding integration to Paraview is definitely something an external library could do though. Maybe you’re up to the challenge? 
3 Likes
Lol I would love it, if only I had the time and skill, but currently I have neither, so I am just taking the cheering side for now. Maybe another time; I don’t see Julia disappearing any time soon
Just imagine the mad skillz you’ll have by the time your ParaVisualize.jl package gets registered on Metadata
4 Likes
Alright, noted, it’s on my to-do-list, right after winning the lottery!
Seriously, I will see what I can do. I think PyCall does a pretty good job for now, anything beyond that would be more aesthetic than functional. It would help to combine the APIs of all CAD software callable via PyCall or command line to import from and export to most formats with simple function calls, possibly combining it with MeshIO, to load the mesh directly into Julia and then dumping it to any other format with all sorts of node-specific info, where the format allows it. That might be more useful than aesthetic.
1 Like