improvements foamToEnsightParts

Currently foamToEnsight and foamToEnsightParts perform somewhat differently.

• foamToEnsight works in serial/parallel, but does not handle cellZones
• foamToEnsightParts handles cellZone, but only works in serial

Desirable to retain cellZone information in parallel as well, which implies making foamToEnsightParts parallel-aware. Explore the possibility of merging some foamToEnsightParts aspects into ensightMesh (ie, foamToEnsight) and enabling/disabling on a switch.

Cross-ref: EP1109

changed milestone to %v2006

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Features still missing, todo, or not:

• finiteAreaFields (TODO?)
• one-boundary combine all patches or patch selection into a single boundary
• surfaceFields, processor-fields (debug only, use foamToVTK).

Pending time/requirements:

• currently scans for the existence of a field at all time steps, we can probably do better and support multiple timesets in the case file.

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closed

Overview of foamToEnsight development

• Before development

Utility	Options	Output	Run in parallel?
foamToEnsight		Ensight format with a part for internalMesh and for each patch, no cellZones	yes
	-cellZone	only the specified zone, one at a time	yes
foamToEnsightParts		Ensight format with a part for each cellZone and patch	no

• After development

Utility	Options	Output	Run in parallel?
foamToEnsight		Ensight format with individual parts for cellZones, unzoned cells and patches	yes
	-cellZones	only specified zones, can be multiple zones	yes
	-cellZones '( "mfp-.*")'	only specified zones, can be multiple zones	yes
	-no-cellZones	Ensight format with cellZones parts suppressed	yes
foamToEnsightParts		redundant, removed

Example of usage on a tutorial case with cellZones, $FOAM_TUTORIALS/incompressible/pimpleFoam/RAS/propeller:
mpirun -np 4 foamToEnsight -parallel
The user can visualize the case in Ensight, as reported in the figure below, where the various cell zones are highlighted in different colors.

Ensight format can be read by ParaView, too. The user can open the Ensight case and apply the filter Extract Block to visualize the cell zones. The figure below shows the same example as above opened in ParaView with the colors representing the various cell zones.

Thank you @Chiara !

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