[Paraview] Specifying the data set name when loading image file or applying filter

[Russell M. Taylor II]

I have had several cases in my vis class, and when working with 
biologists that have large 3D image data sets, where I wanted to load 
in a couple of data sets (or the same data set twice, perhaps at 
different blur levels) and then subtract or otherwise merge the data 
sets (perhaps 3 vector components, one from each file, perhaps to do 
difference-of-Gaussian filtering).

The issue is that there are a bunch of data sets, all with the same 
name ("scalars" for example), so I can't select each one separately 
to combine them.

I can do this by using the Calculator filter on each to produce a new 
data set for each and then using the Append Attributes filter to pull 
them all together.  The calculator step has a couple of unfortunate 
features: (1) it takes a while to run these filters, and (2) it takes 
a lot more memory to do things this way.

Is there any way to tell the input filter what name you'd like to 
have it give to the data set?  It tells you that it will be 
"scalars", but you cannot edit that field to make it something else 
-- all you can do is turn it on or off.  It would save several steps 
and a lot of time and memory if we could name the field something 
useful as it came in the first time.

Thanks,
Russ

p.s. We've pulled a lot of ITK filters together with the BioFormats 
readers into a 3D microscopy tool based on ParaView, called 
ImageSurfer, and this is where I'm currently trying to do 
this.  Thank you so much for making this code available to the 
community to extend!


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Russell M. Taylor II, Ph.D.                           taylorr at cs.unc.edu
CB #3175, Sitterson Hall                        www.cs.unc.edu/~taylorr
University of North Carolina,                     Voice: (919) 962-1701
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175                        FAX:   (919) 962-1799