Exporting to other formats

The purpose of using Layermesh is usually to create a computational mesh which can be used by other software (such as a flow simulator or 3-D visualisation package). This involves expanding the layer/column structure of a Layermesh mesh into a full 3-D mesh, which can then be exported to a mesh format which other software can read.

This can be done by using the mesh export() method, which takes a filename as its parameter. The meshio library is used to write the mesh, so the mesh can be exported to any mesh format that meshio understands (ExodusII, GMSH, VTU, XDMF, H5M and more). The desired format is determined from the filename extension. (Alternatively, it can be explicitly specified using the fmt parameter.)

For example:

import layermesh.mesh as lm
m = lm.mesh('mymesh.h5')
m.export('mymesh.vtu')
m.export('mymesh.msh')

reads a mesh from a Layermesh HDF5 file and exports it twice, first to a VTU file for 3-D visualisation using e.g. Paraview, and then to GMSH *.msh format.