[vtkusers] Big number of actors

[Kent Vander Velden]

  This is good to know, but I was curious if there are alternatives to
using a larger number of actors for my particular problem.  I butted in
on this conversation because of how similar the problems are and hoped
that someone might have an idea.  Namely, if one actor contains a number of
glymph spheres, can a picker select a single sphere, or must a separate
actor be used for each sphere?


>There was a fix to reduce memory requirements in this case that 
>was introduced into vtk sometime after the 3.1 release.
>You might want to check if the nightlies works better for you.
>
>Beyond that there are performance issues when you have large 
>numbers (e.g. 1000's) of actors. Sometime in the past few months
>I posted a message about one of them. This issue is still unresolved.
>There are other issues that also need to be solved, but in conversations
>with the Kitware folks, I believe that there are known options 
>to solve them, however without a fix to the first problem, fixing
>these won't help.
>
>mark
>
>
>>>See the examples:
>>>
>>>graphics/examplesCxx/pdb.cxx
>>>and
>>>graphics/examplesTcl/mole.tcl
>>>
>>>They both use Glyphs to display molecules.
>>
>>  These are nice examples, but what if a person wants to be able to
>>pick individual atoms (individual spheres)?  Then, must there be an
>>individual actor for each atom?  I have experimented with CellPicker,
>>but it is unclear how to use it for this purpose.
>

---
Kent Vander Velden
kent at iastate.edu