vtu or vtk file formats - which is preferred?

ParaView Support
1

I’m using ccx2paraview v2.3.1 to convert calculix results (static and modal). ccx2paraview can produce both vtu and vtk files. Which of these is preferred by Paraview? Why?

Thanks,
Don C.

2

The .vtk files were marked as a legacy format at least 10-15 years ago. They still see a fair amount of use though, either for historical reasons or that people just find their ASCII format pretty simple to generate and to parse. The xml formats (eg, .vtu) should presumably be better streamlined for reading into VTK and provide additional things like compression etc.

If you have the choice of exporting either, then I would definitely take the .vtp, .vtu (xml) formats. They are also really handy if you want to recombine them in a very lightweight .vtm (multiblock) format.
/mark

1 Like