Shrink only made the conventional connected elements look separated.
But, I am writing the nodal data for these elements to move around freely.
For the given picture,
If I write number of points as 6 and elements as 4 with continuous connectivity (4 vertices quad (celltype - 9)); paraview reads it to create finite element mesh.
But I am writing 16 points to define the 4 elements which can move apart later (consider as in case of a crack). This fails to load in paraview and crashes without any error messages.
Here’s an ascii VTK file four_quads.vtk (932 Bytes). The quad elements/points order is slightly different, but this should get you give you the idea on how such a dataset can be constructed.