Visualizing Results with Smokeview

Smokeview is a tool for visualizing the results of Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) simulations. In this tutorial, we’ll show how to run Smokeview directly on Inductiva after your FDS simulation finishes, using the "Town House Kitchen Fire" example from the Smokeview repository.

Prerequisites

Before starting, you should have already run your first FDS simulation using the Inductiva API.

You’ll also need the input files required for this tutorial: thouse5.fds and thouse5_movies.ssf, with minor modifications.

You can download the ready-to-use files here.

Running the Simulation with Visualization

To use Smokeview in scripted mode via the Inductiva API:

• Include a .ssf file (Smokeview script) in your input directory.
• Optionally include a .ini file to define visualization preferences.
• Set the smokeview_case_name argument to match the base name of your simulation (i.e., the .smv file produced by FDS).

Smokeview will be automatically run using:

smokeview -runscript <smokeview_case_name>

Generating Videos from Smokeview Rendered Frames

Smokeview can render sequences of PNG images using the RENDERALL command in your .ssf file. These image sequences can then be automatically compiled into videos using the smokeview_video_sources argument.

For example:

If your .ssf file contains:

RENDERDIR .
...
RENDERALL
 1
thouse5_tslice
...
RENDERALL
 1
thouse5_smoke3d

Smokeview will generate files like:

thouse5_tslice_0001.png, thouse5_tslice_0002.png, ...
thouse5_smoke3d_0001.png, thouse5_smoke3d_0002.png, ...

To generate videos from these, pass the prefixes to smokeview_video_sources:

smokeview_video_sources=["thouse5_tslice", "thouse5_smoke3d"]

Full Example: Running the "Town House Kitchen Fire"

import inductiva

# Allocate a cloud machine
cloud_machine = inductiva.resources.MachineGroup(
    provider="GCP",
    machine_type="c2d-standard-2",
    spot=True)

# Initialize the FDS simulator
fds = inductiva.simulators.FDS(version="6.9.1")

# Run the simulation with visualization enabled
task = fds.run(
    input_dir="/Path/to/SmokeviewKitchenFireExample",
    sim_config_filename="thouse5.fds",
    smokeview_case_name="thouse5",
    smokeview_video_sources=["thouse5_tslice", "thouse5_smoke3d"],
    on=cloud_machine)

# Wait for simulation to complete and download results
task.wait()
cloud_machine.terminate()
task.download_outputs()
task.print_summary()

Note: Set input_dir to the local path containing your .fds, .ssf, and any related files.

Output

The following two MP4 videos will be produced:

Key Takeways

You can use Inductiva to streamline your FDS post-processing with Smokeview, by using the following arguments:

• smokeview_case_name: Must match the base name of the .smv and .ssf files (without extension).
• smokeview_video_sources: PNG filename prefixes used to generate videos for each rendered sequence.