[vtk-developers] New image mappers

[David Gobbi]

The dashboard is coming up clean for the new image mapper classes
(vtkImageSliceMapper and vtkImageResliceMapper) so I'm confident
that they're ready to use now.

There are two issues remaining to be fixed:
- They always render duing the "Opaque" pass
- They don't work properly when in an assembly

I'm thinking that I'll let the user select which pass to render in:
1) as an underlay (render first, don't set the depth buffer)
2) as per the default  (check and set the depth buffer)
3) in "translucent" pass (check but don't set the depth buffer)
4) as an overlay (render last, don't check or set depth buffer)

Not giving the user access to all of these options seems unnecessarily
restrictive (and this restrictiveness was one thing I disliked about the
vtkImageActor).

The assembly issue is a bug, so I just have to fix it.  I'm also strongly
considering an image-specific assembly subclass called "vtkImageStack"
to simplify layering of images.  The idea is that each image can be
assigned a layer number, and vtkImageStack will ensure that the images
in the stack are sorted according to this number.  This will also allow me
to add some tricks to eliminate all depth buffer coincidence problems
between the images.

 - David


On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 8:25 AM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
> The new image mappers have been merged into VTK.
> For a description of these mappers, see the wiki page:
> http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Image_Rendering_Classes
>
>  - David
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 7:40 AM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I just pushed another image-mapper patchset to gerrit this
>> morning.  In this patchset, vtkImage has been renamed to
>> vtkImageSlice and more bugs have been fixed.  Unless
>> something comes up, I'll merge this into VTK tomorrow.
>>
>>  - David
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 10:10 AM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I've updated gerrit with my latest image mapper patches.
>>> http://review.source.kitware.com/1163
>>> This patch set includes a full set of regression tests.
>>> I'm hoping to be able to move this into VTK next week.
>>>
>>>  - David
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:06 PM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I've pushed my new image mapper classes to Gerrit,
>>>> you should be able to find them at the following link:
>>>> http://review.source.kitware.com/1163
>>>>
>>>> They come with one example (in python, of course)
>>>> and over the next few days I'll add some regression
>>>> tests.
>>>>
>>>>  - David
>>>>
>>>
>>
>