[Paraview] Animation and Filter Help with CSV/VTP XYZ Data

[Cory Quammen]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 6:21 PM, Maxwell Dausch <mdausc2 at uic.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>  I am very new to using paraview and have had a couple questions that I am
> having trouble finding the resources needed to help my situation. I've been
> searching the mailing list and other forums for the past week or so and have
> not had much progress.
>
> I am trying to figure out how to
> 1) Animate a series of points that were obtained by tracking a person's
> movement, and animate it in a way that would play back the moment path, I
> would like to animate it by the order the points are in with a set time
> interval in-between each point if possible. In this situation there are
> multiple different trackers which is why I also need a bit of guidance on
> part 2, so the data just doesn’t get all mixed up together.

First thing first: you'll want to split your points up into several
CSV files, one for each time step. In each of the CSV files, you will
list the point positions and the ID, e.g.

path1.csv contains the first time step:

"ID","X","Y","Z"
1,0.0,1.0,0.0
2,1.0,1.1,1.2


path2.csv contains the second time step:

"ID","X","Y","Z"
1,0.0,1.0,0.0
2,1.0,1.2,1.3

and so one.

To animate these files, you will load the entire list of CSV files
through the Open File dialog by navigating to the location of these
files and selecting the group of files labeled "path..csv". Because
the data you are loading is tabular, it will open up a SpreadSheet
view showing you the raw tables. You can close this view as you won't
be needing it. Click back on the default 3D RenderView and then select
the path* source in the Pipeline Browser. To turn these into points,
use the TableToPoints filter, setting the "X Column" property to "X",
the "Y Column" to "Y", and the "Z Column" to "Z".

Now, you'll need to show the points, which aren't visible at this
point. You can add a Glyph filter to display the points with some
geometry. The "Glyph Type" will default to "Arrow", but you can change
that to "Sphere" or whatever your favorite shape is.

> 2) Color points by a source id for the movement tracker assigned to the
> point, i.e. id’s 1-5 would be blue, 6-10 would be red and so on, I've only
> been able to color the whole table of points one color and not sure how to
> proceed.

Coloring by ID is pretty easy. In the tool bar, color the glyphs by
the "ID" array. Open up the "Color Map Editor" and check the
"Interpret Values As Categories" box. Under "Annotations", click on
the icon with the folder and heart ("Choose preset"). Pick one of the
color map presets for categorical data. Next, click on the toolbutton
just above that with the red, yellow, and blue rectangles ("Add active
values from selected source"). This will assign the ID values to the
colors in the color map.

I hope that gets you going,
Cory

> Currently I am working with a csv (that I also have been able to convert to
> an .vtp file if that is able to help the situation at all) that contains a
> source Id for the tracker as well as the points xyz.
>
> Ive been trying to mess around with the programmable filters ( I don’t have
> too much experience with python though ), but I am unsure on how to access
> the other attributes of the data(the source id) and thus when I try link the
> points with a line, it jumps from one path to another and in return it mixes
> the movement paths.
>
> I’d appreciate any guidance with this, as I am at wits ends trying to figure
> everything out. Especially when Ive only been able to find solid objects
> being animated and not too much point data being worked with when searching
> for any possible solutions to the problem. If it might be of any help I
> could upload one of the csv files that we have generated.
>
> Thanks again
> -Max
>
>
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-- 
Cory Quammen
Staff R&D Engineer
Kitware, Inc.