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

[Cory Quammen]

Utkarsh,

Forgive me, I should have specified how I was running the server. Here
is the command I used that resulted in the strange behavior:

mpirun -np 4 pvserver -display :0 --server-port=11111 --use-offscreen-rendering

It seems to work fine for all rendering aside from volume rendering of
unstructured grids.

Thanks,
Cory

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 2:04 AM, Utkarsh Ayachit
<utkarsh.ayachit at kitware.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Cory Quammen
Research Associate
Department of Computer Science
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill