Colormaps

Figure 1. ParaView's Choose Preset dialog after importing 41 IDL LUT's and 50 Matplotlib LUT's.

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Contributed Colormaps

The following files contain collections of colormaps. To use them download the file and import it using ParaView's Color Scale Editor dialog. Open the editor, select Choose Preset and then Import and select the file.

• 41 colormaps from IDL : all_idl_cmaps.xml
• 50 colormaps from Matplotlib : all_mpl_cmaps.xml

Refer to figure 1 for example of the new LUT's.

ParaView's xml colormap file format

You can create an xml file like this:

<source lang=xml> <ColorMap name="Consistency" space="RGB"> <Point x="-1.000" o="1" r="0.0" g="0.0" b="0.0"/> <Point x="0.000" o="1" r="0.0" g="1.0" b="0.0"/> <Point x="1.000" o="1" r="1.0" g="0.0" b="0.0"/> </ColorMap> </source>

which specifies that values=-1 should be black (rgb=(0,0,0)), values at 0 should be green, and values at 1 should be red. You can then click "Edit color map" -> "Choose preset" -> "Import", select the new xml file, and you will see the colors are interpolated along the new color axis you have defined.

Writing a Matlab color map to xml

The following Matlab function writes a Matlab named color map to the Paraview xml color map format. The argument to be passed in is the name of the colormap (default is 'jet').

<source lang=matlab> function [] = paraview_color_space(scheme)

 if (exist('scheme') ~= 1), scheme='jet'; end
 colors = eval(scheme);
 N = length(colors);
 fid = fopen([scheme '.xml'], 'w');
 fprintf(fid, '<ColorMap name="%s" space="HSV">\n', scheme);
 for i=1:N
     x = [(i-1)/(N-1); colors(i,:)'];
     fprintf(fid, '  <Point x="%f" o="1" r="%f" g="%f" b="%f"/>\n', x);
 end
 fwrite(fid, '</ColorMap>');
 fclose(fid);

end </source>