[Paraview] Problems with rendering/interacting with a large-ish volume data set...

[Brian Corrie]

Hello all,

I was wondering if someone could provide me with some advice. I am 
trying to work with a large-ish (not really that large) volume data set. 
It is a 698x69x665 unsigned byte data set (~320MB).

When working with Paraview (3.98.0-RC1) operations on the data set are 
quite cumbersome and relatively simple operations cause all sorts of 
havoc. I am wondering if there is something odd with my set up or are my 
expectations of interacting with a largeish volume data set too high. 
The specs for my workstation are:

Windows 7 Pro, 64 bit, 2 X5690 processors (12 cores) at 3.47 GHz, 24 GB 
of memory, nVidia Quadro 6000 graphics card. Pretty loaded...

Rendering the data set with surface or volume is relatively interactive. 
When I try to apply other common filters (clip, threshold, isosurface) 
strange things occur:

1) Applying a Clip filter causes Paraview to eventually consume 100% of 
the memory on my machine (24 GB). The computation of the filter runs 
forever, and I essentially have to kill off Paraview (the filter 
application doesn't complete after waiting several minutes).

2) Applying a Threshold filter causes the same to occur. Basically 
causes memory usage to climb to 100% (24 GB). The filter never completes 
(at least not before my patience runs out 8-)

3) Applying a Contour threshold works but strange things happen after 
isosurface creation. It creates a large polygon mesh (9M cells). With 
that said, memory footprint is still quite small. When interacting it 
renders using LOD so it is interactive. When I stop interacting it takes 
a couple of seconds to render at full resolution and another two seconds 
or so after it reaches full resolution LOD before I can interact with 
the application again. Approximately 4 seconds between stopping one 
interaction with the visualization (e.g. rotating the model) and being 
able to interact with the application again. Performance/interaction 
wise that is OK. The main problem is that only half the data set is 
rendered (see the image attached) at full LOD. There is no clip plane in 
the pipeline and yet half the data is missing in the display. The image 
should be a full sphere. When rendered at the lower LOD the entire data 
set is displayed, when rendered at full LOD the data is not.

The above does not seem normal. The data set is large, but not huge. I 
certainly wouldn't expect the memory usage to spike to 24 GB and the 
rendering with the isosurface is very odd.

Any advice from more experienced Paraview users? Should I get better 
performance/results? I would have thought so, are my expectations our to 
lunch? Or is this a bug that I should report?

Brian








-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: IsoSurfaceProblem.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 287395 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.paraview.org/pipermail/paraview/attachments/20121214/4de2e4f8/attachment-0001.jpg>