Skip to content

Extract Attribute Arrays from Geometry

Group (Subgroup)

DREAM3D Review (Geometry)

Description

This Filter extracts the Attribute Arrays that define the topology of a Geometry object and stores them explicitly in the data structure. This allows information such as Vertex coordinates or Element to Vertex connectivity to be manipulated outside of Geometries (e.g, extracting the arrays into the data structure allows for them to be easily exported to a text file). This Filter extracts the folllowing array information for each Geometry:

Type Attribute Arrays Extracted
Rectilinear Grid x bounds, y bounds, z bounds
Vertex vertex coordinates
Edge vertex coordinates, edge-to-vertex connectivity
Triangle vertex coordinates, triangle-to-vertex connectivity
Quadrilateral vertex coordinates, quadrilateral-to-vertex connectivity
Tetrahedral vertex coordinates, tetrahedral-to-vertex connectivity
Hexahedral vertex coordinates, hexahedral-to-vertex connectivity

Image Geometries do not store their topological information using Attribute Arrays, since the number of values needed to define an Image is small. For more information on how to understand the arrays produced by this Filter (e.g., rectilinear bounds, edge-to-vertex connectivities, etc.), read the documentation for the Create Geometry Filter.

The user must select destinations for the extracted arrays. It is strongly recommended to extract the arrays into Attribute Matrices associated with the corresponding Element types. For example, the shared Vertex lists should be stored in the Vertex Attribute Matrix of the original Data Container, and the Triangle lists should be stored in the Face Attribute Matrix of the original Data Container. This helps keep the information organized more easily (the interface will also enforce these selections); the only actual requirement, however, is that the created arrays properly fit in their destination Attribute Matrix.

The bounds arrays extracted from Rectilinear Grids are a special case; the size of these arrays does not correspond to the number of Cells in the Rectilinear Grid (see here for more details). Therefore, the bounds arrays will not properly fit into the standard Cell Attribute Matrix of a Data Container that contains a Rectilinear Grid. The user will most likely need to manually create Attribute Matrices for each of the bounds arrays (in the general case, this means creating three new Attribute Matrices, since the x, y, and z bounds of a Rectilinear Grid may all be of different sizes).

Note: This Filter copies the arrays from the selected Geometry. Therefore, any operations on the original Geometry will not affect arrays created by this Filter, and any operations performed on the new arrays will not affect the original Geometry. The arrays created by this Filter are the same kinds of arrays needed to create a Geometry. In general, Geometries may store information other than simple connectivity (e.g., neighbor connectivities, vertex-to-element connectivities, etc.). These additional arrays are not extracted by this Filter.

Parameters

None

Required Geometry

RectGrid, Vertex, Edge, Triangle, Quadrilateral, Tetrahedral, or Hexahedral

Required Objects

Kind Default Name Type Component Dimensions Description
Data Container None N/A N/A Data Container holding the Geometry from which to extract Attribute Arrays

Created Objects

Kind Default Name Type Component Dimensions Description
Various Attribute Arrays None float/int64_t 1/2/3/4 Various Attribute Arrays used to define the Geometry topology; see this documentation for a detailed discussion of what kinds of information are held within Geometry

Example Pipelines

Please see the description file distributed with this plugin.

DREAM3D Mailing Lists

If you need more help with a filter, please consider asking your question on the DREAM3D Users mailing list: