[Paraview] Advice sought on proper color value storage for custom filter

[Kent Eschenberg]

1 locks you to a colormap. 2 lets the user change the colormap as the display media and context change.

Kent
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Mike Jackson wrote:
> I am writing a custom reader + filter for my customer. For conversations 
> sakes lets say the data (unstructured grid) could be in one of 12 
> categories. The customer wants to be able to set a custom display color 
> for each of the categories. I think there are a few different ways to go 
> about this but I am not sure of the pit falls of either way.
> 
> 1: Add a 3 component scalar array to the data set that holds the RGB 
> value that the cell would need. (Which category the cell is in is 
> determined as the filter runs). I believe ParaView will interpret this 
> as RGB colors and "Do the right thing"
> 
> 2: Add a single component scalar value that holds which category the 
> cell belongs to and then have the user load a custom color lookup table 
> from the disk.
> 
> 
> 1 seems easier for the end user but would seem to take up more memory.
> 2 seems less easy (Manually have to load a custom color xml file) but 
> may take less memory because I am storing 1 byte instead of 3.
> 
> Any one have any thoughts on this?
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> -- 
> Mike Jackson
> imikejackson & gmail * com