This is a tutorial for automating ParaView using scripts. ParaView provides numerous tools (aka filters) for working on 3D datasets, like contours, line plots, threshold etc. It provides an easy interface to automate these tasks through python scripting. The python version being used in the latest version of ParaView (5.7) is still python2, and its probably going to continue for a long time. The ParaView blog and the exhaustive documentation provide some details on python scripting, but here I introduce it from a beginners perspective using a lot of auto-generating a lot of code by tracing the GUI steps. Here’s a brief sequence of the way the essential topics will be addressed:

  1. ParaView’s “Trace” feature
  2. simple and dsa libraries
  3. Generating and running our first script
  4. Using python in the script
  5. What is possible?