VTK File Formats#
Overview#
A lot of this material is taken from The VTK User’s Guide.
The Visualization Toolkit provides a number of source and writer objects to read and write popular data file formats. The Visualization Toolkit also provides some of its own file formats. The main reason for creating yet another data file format is to offer a consistent data representation scheme for a variety of dataset types, and to provide a simple method to communicate data between software. Whenever possible, we recommend that you use formats that are more widely used. But if this is not possible, the Visualization Toolkit formats described here can be used instead. Note that these formats may not be supported by many other tools.
There are three different styles of file formats available in VTK: Legacy, XML and VTKHDF.
Legacy#
It’s a serial formats that are easy to read and write either by hand or programmatically.
For more details, read the related documentation.
XML#
More flexible but more complex than the legacy file format, it supports random access, parallel I/O, and portable data compression and are preferred to the serial VTK file formats whenever possible.
For more details, read the related documentation.
VTKHDF#
This is a file format using the same concepts as the XML formats described above but relying on HDF5 for actual storage. It is simpler than the XML. It provides good I/O performance as well as robust and flexible parallel I/O capabilities and may to replace others file formats once it will be complete. It can be read/written using either hdf5 directly or the vtkhdf implementation in VTK.
For more details, read the related documentation.