ParaView animations, rendered on your team's machines

Anyone who has made a video of a simulation in ParaView knows the routine. You get the scene and the color map right, place the camera, and then the workstation renders the animation one frame after another while you wait. Ask for 4K, add more timesteps or a camera flight around the model, and the wait grows with every frame.

Those frames don't depend on each other. Frame 80 can render at the same moment as frame 3, on a different machine. Blender artists have had networks that do exactly this for years, SheepIt being the best known. For ParaView, the usual way to spread frames over several machines is still a pvbatch script and a cluster to run it on.

The OmnibusCloud plugin brings that kind of network to ParaView. It renders on the machines of your group, whether that's the workstations in your office or your own computers at home. The plugin is free and runs inside the official ParaView releases on Windows, Linux and macOS.

One button inside ParaView

You build the scene the way you always do. The plugin adds a panel with one main action, Render on OmnibusCloud.

When you press it, the plugin captures your ParaView session as it stands, with the pipeline, the view, the camera and the color maps. It collects the files the scene reads, uploads them, and the render machines open the same session and render it. A still comes back as an image. An animation comes back as a set of frames or as a video in MP4, WebM or ProRes, with a transparent background if you want one. The result loads straight back into ParaView.

You don't write a pvbatch script or export a state file, and you don't need an account on a cluster.

The frames of an animation render in parallel across the group, and the panel counts them as they finish. While the job runs, your own workstation stays free for the next scene.

What it renders

The render machines run a fixed list of ParaView readers and filters, published with the open-source controller →. Exodus, CGNS and EnSight files aren't on it.

A camera move works on any scene, static or not. On a scene without time, the move is the whole video. With timesteps, the camera circles the model while the simulation plays.

CalculiX results, opened directly

The plugin also brings a reader for CalculiX .frd files. ParaView opens them from File › Open like any native format, with every result step on the timeline. Temperatures, displacements and stresses arrive as ordinary ParaView arrays, so slices, clips and plots work on them right away, with no conversion step.

The reader works without an account and without a network. If you solve with PrePoMax or run ccx yourself, this part alone is worth the install.

It pairs well with the OmnibusCloud Solver for PrePoMax →, which sends heat-transfer analyses to your group's machines and writes back an ordinary .frd. You can open that result in ParaView and render the animation on the same machines that solved it.

OpenFOAM cases

Most OpenFOAM users look at their results in ParaView, and CFD animations are some of the heaviest things it renders. The plugin opens a case through ParaView's own OpenFOAM reader and uploads only what that reader reads: the mesh, the dictionaries and the time directories being rendered. Post-processing output, logs, mesher inputs and backups stay on your machine, and the panel lists them by name.

On the motorBike tutorial that comes to 45 files out of the whole solved case. Reconstructed and decomposed cases both work, following the reader's Case Type setting.

It tells you before it spends anything

The panel tells you what it's about to do before it does it:

• Before upload, a data plan lists the files and their size, and how much is already in the cloud from earlier renders.
• Before you press Render, a pre-flight line says what will come back, for example This job renders 160 frames · 1920×1080 PNG.
• If a scene can't render, the panel says why before anything leaves your machine. It might be a missing file, a size over the limit or a programmable filter, which the render machines won't run.
• Check on the server asks the server to validate the scene without rendering a frame.

When it pays off

A quick still of a small scene is faster on your own workstation, because the upload and download take longer than the render. Keep those local.

The plugin is worth it for the jobs that tie up a workstation: animations over many timesteps, long camera flights, high resolutions, several variants of the same scene. The more machines in your group, the more frames render at once. And once the data is in the cloud, a second render of the same scene with a different output uploads only what changed.

Where it runs

Rendering goes to a private group → or a project → your account belongs to. A private group is the usual start: install the OmnibusCloud client → on the office machines, add them to a group, and the plugin renders on them whenever they're free. Those machines don't need ParaView installed. OmnibusCloud brings the ParaView runtime with the job.

OmnibusCloud also installs on your own servers. Scenes, results and render machines then stay inside your network, which matters when simulation data can't leave the company. It's also faster: uploads and downloads go over the office network, so the transfer that makes a small job slower in the cloud mostly goes away. The plugin works the same way there. An administrator puts the company server's address in the plugin's settings once, for every user. Write to us → if that fits your setup.

Get started

The plugin is on the downloads page →. The getting-started guide → walks through installing it, opening a CalculiX result and rendering your first still, animation and OpenFOAM case.

Questions and feedback: r/OmnibusCloud →.