[Paraview] Rendering mixed translucent and opaque surfaces in parallel

[Gregory D Abram]

I might be doing this wrong, but here goes.  I have a set of points and
associated atomic numbers, and a volume field.  I want to render spheres
colored appropriately for the atom type, and combine them together with
translucent isosurfaces of the volume.

In a filter, I map the atomic numbers to an index (called "mapped atomic
number"), and attach a color lookup table to that point data set which maps
the indices to the color thats appropriate for the atomic number.  Thats a
bit awkward; my LUT has three elements per index, essentially mapping
(index-0.333) to (index+0.333) to the color for that index.  Then I pass
that through the Glyph3D filter and render, and when I tell it to color by
"mapped atomic number" I get what I expect, both when I tell it to
composite and not,  parallel or not.

Unfortunately, when I embed the glyphs in a translucent isosurface it seems
to drop the lookup table.  If I run on 2 nodes and tell it to composite,
half the glyphs are colored without regard for the LUT.  If I tell it not
to composite, none of the glyphs are rendered using the LUT.

Fooling around in the debugger, it seems it uses vtkPolyDataWriter and
vtkPolyDataReader to serialize and de-serialize the data thats being
exchanged between nodes.  I coded up a little experiment that creates a
vtkUnstructuredGrid similar to my input data with a LUT, glyphs it and
vtkPolyDaWriter's it.  The output vtk file doesn't show the LUT, making me
think the LUT is getting dropped when PV moves the data from node to node.

Help!  Is there another way I should be doing this?  Alas, for the moment I
need to use PV2.

Greg
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