[Paraview] Bug in volume rendering of unstructured grids on server

[Utkarsh Ayachit]

Can you try running pvserver as follows:
mpiexec <....> pvserver --use-offscreen-rendering

Does that help?

Utkarsh

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 5:52 PM, Cory Quammen <cquammen at cs.unc.edu> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I am attempted to do client/server rendering of an unstructured grid
> using ParaView 3.12 that I have compiled myself on a RedHat system
> with two NVIDIA Quadro FX 5000 graphics cards. I have built ParaView
> from the v3.12.0 tag. To summarize, the problem is that only a subset
> of the unstructured grid data is rendered.
>
> Here is what I have done so far to attempt to identify the problem.
>
> 1). Start the server on 4 cores. Start the client and connect it to the server.
> 2). Add a Wavelet source with the default parameters. I have the Edit
> -> Settings -> Render View -> Server -> Remote Render Threshold set to
> 0 MBytes to force server side rendering, so 4 windows titled
> "Visualization Tookit - OpenGL" appear right away. They are stacked
> neatly on top of each other and the contents of the windows are all
> black.
> 3). Change the Representation to Volume. Everything renders in
> ParaView as expected. The content of the rendering windows from the
> server stay black.
> 4). Add a Tetrahedralize filter connected to the Wavelet source.
> 5). Change the Representation to Volume. Now the problems begin.
> First, the content of the rendering windows is no longer black. It is
> the same as the content in the ParaView display except that the
> background color in the server window is black instead of the gray
> background I have in the ParaView display. Also, only a subset of the
> data is volume rendered. If I move the top window in the stack of
> windows from the server, I see more data in ParaView, and in the
> window that has been revealed is a different subset of the data set.
> If I rearrange the windows so that they are all on top of all other
> windows, I can see the whole data set volume rendered. However, if any
> of the windows are covered up or go offscreen, then the portion of the
> data set that is covered or off the screen does not appear in
> ParaView.
> 6). If I change the Representation back to Surface, the view in
> ParaView now suffers the same way as when the Representation was
> Volume. The same is true for Outline, Points, Surface with Edges, and
> Wireframe representations.
>
> Clearly, the volume representation for unstructured grid data sets is
> causing a change in the way rendering is carried out on the server. If
> I can guarantee that the windows from the server are uncovered, then
> volume rendering of unstructured grids seems to work. However, this
> seems unnecessary considering how the other representations don't
> appear to have this requirement.
>
> Can anyone shed some light on what might be going on here?
>
> By the way, I have confirmed that I have the same problem on a
> different system with Fedora 14 installed.
>
> Thanks,
> Cory
>
> --
> Cory Quammen
> Research Associate
> Department of Computer Science
> The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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