output from writeSolution to VTK by default?

[jaredmagnusson]

I see the default output is f5, and the f5tovtk has been great for converting for visualization purposes. Would it be possible to add an optional argument to writeSolution to allow vtk to be output automatically, or even directly from the BDF? it'd be nice if the default output was visualizable from an open-source analysis tool like Paraview. f5 are probably more compact but don't seem compliant with standard HDF5 readers, and feel like an intermediate step to being able to check results. and unlike tecplot, direct vtk outputs wouldn't require a prior TECIO-like installation for the user.

or to save space but still viewable from Paraview (this would probably be for down the road, pretty new format), could output as a VTK HDF file?

[timryanb]

This is probably something we could look into as an option. I think the f5 file format was originally developed to prevent bottlenecking during the file writing procedure for large parallel cases, but @gjkennedy would know better about this. We could look a re-writing some of the paraview/tecplot writing procedures to allow them to optionally write directly from a tacs solution in memory, but that would likely take some work.