Exporting Volumetric Plots to Blender#

This guide explains how to build and use external libraries to export volumetric plots into a blender-readable format. This feature is required to export volumes into blender for improved visualization. The relevant code can be found in the following folder: finnpy_ext_export_openvdb. The required shared libraries (for use in Python) can be build via make. For a more detailed guide, see Building an External Library.

Requirements#

This library requires the presence of the following libraries:

Windows#

Boost, blosc, and tbb can be installed via Msys2,

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-boost
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-c-blosc
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-tbb

Cmake can be downloaded and installed from here (https://cmake.org/).

MacOs#

Cmake, boost, blosc, and tbb can be installed via Homebrew,

brew install boost c-blosc
brew install boost tbb
brew install boost tbb

Linux#

Cmake, boost, blosc, and tbb can be installed via apt

apt install libboost-all-dev
apt install libblosc-dev
apt install libtbb-dev
apt install cmake

or pacman

pacman -S boost
pacman -S blosc
pacman -S tbb
pacman -S cmake

All#

After having provided its dependencies, OpenVDB may be installed as follows. First, the GitHub repository needs to be downloaded (AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb). Subsequently, a terminal (e.g. PowerShell) should be opened and navigated to the extracted GitHub repository. Having entered openvdb-master, a build folder needs to be created (mkdir build), navigated into (cd build), and cmake called on the parent directory (cmake ..).

Subsequently, OpenVDB needs to be build via make.

Finally, OpenVDB needs to be either added to the path or placed in the same directory as finnpy_ext_export_openvdb.

Building the library#

The make command for finnpy_ext_export_openvdb may be called, building the library for use in Python (see Building an External Library).