[Paraview] Parallel image data, pieces stored as PNG?

[Paul Melis]

Dear all,

Is it possible to use one of the parallel file formats to read in a 3D
image data set from a set of 2D slices, where the slice images remain in
a standard image format (e.g. PNG, JPEG)? Concretely, I have a set of
slices in PNG format and want to visualize/process the volume they
define in parallel, i.e. using multiple pvserver processes on a cluster.
I was hoping to avoid having to convert the slice images to a VTK
format, but from reading the VTK file formats docs it seems this is
necessary. I tried referencing them from a .pvti file as pieces stored
in PNG files, but this doesn't seem to work. Is converting the slices to
VTK (e.g. .vti) the only way?

Regards,
Paul