[Paraview] plugin for stereo animation rendering

[Evan Bollig]

Alright, Im having no luck modifying paraview for my own needs on this
one. I have been trying to get the call to "writer->Save()"
(vtkSMAnimationSceneImageWriter::Save)  in pqAnimationManager.cxx to
modify the FileName (i.e. insert ".left." before the extension of the
filename chosen by the qt file selector), then render+save the
animation from to two different filenames. I have the renaming done,
but the generated left/right files are exactly the same. What I do
though is call "the vtkRenderWindow->STEREO_LEFT view, then do the
same thing again rendering with vtkRenderWindow->STEREO_RIGHT.
Unfortunately, I think something lower level is forcing the rendering
to stay "left" (or turns stereo off) because both sequences come out
exactly the same. Here is a cvs diff of the damage Ive done so far:

http://people.scs.fsu.edu/~bollig/vislab/development/paraview/diff.txt

Can I submit a feature request and hope someone will continue?

-Evan

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Evan Bollig <bollig at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, we render movies with two different approaches in other
> software. Amira renders side-by-side format PNGs, MPEG or AVI meaning
> the left and right eyes are contained in the double wide viewport like
> Ken mentioned. I recently wrote a plugin for VMD which renders the
> left and right eyes as separate TGA snapshots and then coalesces all
> the lefts into a left eye movie and all rights into a right eye movie
> (left-/right-eye format) using imagemagick or mencoder. LLNLs VisIT
> has internal support for rendering the left-/right-eye snapshots like
> VMD, but it does not internally coalesce them. I wrote a few batch
> scripts that use MEncoder (ffmpeg) to stitch the image sequences
> together.
>
> Either format is desirable, and in fact the left-/right-eye format
> sometimes functions better because each eye is an independent movie
> that can be distributed and played as if it was rendered in mono.
> "standard" format is difficult to define, but Id vote for the
> left/right. To view the stereo movies we use the Stereoscopic Player
> from http://3dtv.at which supports side-by-side, interlaced,
> over-under, left/right, etc.
>
> -Evan
>
> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com> wrote:
>> Sure, I get that but what application and what format does it expect?
>> Is there a "standard" movie format for stereo?
>>
>> -berk
>>
>> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:25 AM, Moreland, Kenneth <kmorel at sandia.gov> wrote:
>>> Berk,
>>>
>>> I don't think Even is looking for any special interface to some stereo display system.  He is simply looking for a feature in save animation that will save images for the left and right eyes.  For example, each frame would be an image twice as long as the requested viewport with the left and right eye images side-by-side.  It would be up to some other program to properly take this information and display it with a stereo display.
>>>
>>> -Ken
>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: paraview-bounces at paraview.org [mailto:paraview-bounces at paraview.org]
>>>> On Behalf Of Berk Geveci
>>>> Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 6:47 AM
>>>> To: Evan Bollig
>>>> Cc: paraview-users
>>>> Subject: Re: [Paraview] plugin for stereo animation rendering
>>>>
>>>> I am not by any means an expert on stereo but I don't think what you
>>>> are asking for is straightforward. You want to support active stereo
>>>> in a movie. This is not a matter of simply saving a set of images. You
>>>> would need a special player that is aware of the nvidia hardware. The
>>>> closest thing you can do with ParaView is to turn on geometry caching
>>>> so that after the first time you animation plays faster. Have you
>>>> saved/played stereo movies with other applications before?
>>>>
>>>> On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Evan Bollig <bollig at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> > Well in a way, yes. We have quad-buffered stereo setups (active and
>>>> > passive) with nvidia quadro cards. Playing with our data in stereo is
>>>> > easily done with ParaView using the -stereo command line argument.
>>>> > However, our end goal is to play with the data and render an
>>>> > animation/movie which consumes a fraction of what the full data
>>>> > consumes and can be played on demand during demos or presentations. As
>>>> > far as I can tell Paraview is missing support for stereo movie
>>>> > rendering (side-by-side, over-under, interlaced and/or left/right
>>>> > movie files).
>>>> >
>>>> > -Evan
>>>> >
>>>> > On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 10:00 PM, Berk Geveci <berk.geveci at kitware.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> >> Are you referring to passive stereo?
>>>> >>
>>>> >> -berk
>>>> >>
>>>> >> On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 5:53 PM, Evan Bollig <bollig at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> >>> Has anyone worked with or heard of a plugin for paraview that enables
>>>> >>> stereo movie (animation) rendering? I find it hard to believe that
>>>> >>> paraview would be designed to render interactively in stereo mode but
>>>> >>> then movie generation is only capable of mono mode. What files would I
>>>> >>> begin to look in if I wanted to add this feature? Does it require
>>>> >>> editing the paraview source or could I drop in a script without
>>>> >>> recompiling?
>>>> >>>
>>>> >>> -Evan
>>>> >>>
>>>> >>> --
>>>> >>> -Evan Bollig
>>>> >>> bollig at gmail.com
>>>> >>> bollig at scs.fsu.edu
>>>> >>> _______________________________________________
>>>> >>> ParaView mailing list
>>>> >>> ParaView at paraview.org
>>>> >>> http://www.paraview.org/mailman/listinfo/paraview
>>>> >>>
>>>> >>
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> >
>>>> > --
>>>> > -Evan Bollig
>>>> > bollig at gmail.com
>>>> > bollig at scs.fsu.edu
>>>> >
>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> -Evan Bollig
> bollig at gmail.com
> bollig at scs.fsu.edu
>



-- 
-Evan Bollig
bollig at gmail.com
bollig at scs.fsu.edu