[Paraview] Feasibility of and documentation on implementing a Paraview Client.

[Shawn Waldon]

Hi Magnus,

I don't know much about getting ParaView to work in the client-server mode
you describe and less about the Unreal engine, but if you are willing to
sacrifice a little bit of rendering speed would be to build VTK with OSMesa
and let it do software rendering rather than requiring a hardware context
(which it can't seem to get due to some interference with Unreal).  I just
thought I would point out the option, you can try it and decide if you
think the rendering speed hit is too much.

HTH,
Shawn

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 8:49 AM, corinna reuter <corinnareuter75 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Sorry, my Paraview experience is too limited and my Unreal knowledge is
> zero, so that I won't be able to give you anything else than some ideas.
> First of all, Paraview cannot compete with game engines in terms of
> rendering speed, because the data structures are more complicated.
> Still, if you write your own "Paraview client", you'll end up with the
> original paraview application reduced to only the 3d view widget. You could
> suppress its output and grab the image data.
> I guess you have already considered fixing the OpenGL setup. If you are
> running on a headless cluster, you could install the osmesa implementation.
> But without a thorough understanding of how you are interfacing with the
> Unreal engine in detail and what data type and sizes and frame rates you
> expect, I cannot suggest anything else than following the wiki on custom
> Paraview applications. I am sure, others on this list will help.
>
> Corinna
>
> On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 2:02 PM, Magnus Elden <magnus_elden at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>>
>> I think you should explain why you don't want to use the paraview
>> application as your client.
>>
>>
>>
>> I am using the Unreal Engine 4 for my project and I want to use the power
>> of Paraview to read and render scientific volume data. I tried writing a
>> small program using the VTK library, but I was unable to get it to work due
>> to the program complaining about not being able to find/create an OpenGL
>> context. As such I am forced to separate the rendering and the Unreal
>> program. Having the client and the servers separated is something that
>> Paraview supports natively and as such I do not imagine that it should be
>> more difficult than to implement a code only client that my UE4 program
>> uses to interface with the Paraview servers.
>>
>>
>>
>> As you can see, I am unable to use the paraview application because I
>> will be using another application. Since UE4 has no real support for volume
>> data or scientific visualization I am left between a choice of implementing
>> everything that Paraview already has or writing a new client that handles
>> the translation between my UE4 program and the Paraview server.
>>
>> The former option will force me to spend a lot of time implementing an
>> inferior version of parts of Paraview and the latter require me to create a
>> client that is able to communicate properly with the servers. I would argue
>> that the latter is less work if good documentation and specifications are
>> to be found. Further, I would think that the project can scale much more
>> effectively if I am able to utilize the Paraview servers.
>>
>>
>>
>> I hope to feed the paraview servers with user made updates and then feed
>> the resulting render back to the UE4 application in order to present it to
>> the user.
>>
>>
>>
>> Yours,
>>
>> Magnus Elden
>>
>
>
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