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

[Luc Renambot]

Hi,

Can a plugin (a pvserver plugin I guess)  access the rendered pixels ?

A long time ago, we had to modify one of the base VTK class to access rendered pixel (a la ‘glReadPixels’) and recompile the whole thing.
It would be nice to do that in a plugin...

...Luc...

Luc Renambot
renambot at uic.edu                    Electronic Visualization Lab (M/C 152)
EVL Phone (312) 996-3002       University of Illinois at Chicago
EVL FAX   (312) 413-7585         851 S. Morgan St. Room 1120 SEO
http://renambot.lakephoto.org    Chicago, IL 60607-7053


> On Aug 16, 2016, at 8:00 AM, Shawn Waldon <shawn.waldon at kitware.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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