[vtkusers] Selection model interaction between infovis views and non-infovis views

[Eric E. Monson]

Well, if you're just talking about the performance of a "3D plot" type of visualization, if you're satisfied with displaying vertices like the point cloud in that example (with my graphics card they show up as little filled squares), then your performance should be just fine since they will be drawn as simple OpenGL vertices, which are very fast. If you move to something like point sprites, that will be fast, too, and should handle tens of thousands. But, if you glyph each vertex with something like a sphere or other 3D shape, then you'll start to slow down rendering all of those polys.

For other types of 2D graphs, there are at least a couple of different solutions within VTK, and their performance might vary. I know part of the motivation behind the new Charts classes (generally falls under the category of the "new 2D API") has been performance. Those classes aren't quite as mature, and are changing rapidly, but if performance is a big issue you might want to go that way.

Talk to you later,
-Eric


On Aug 27, 2010, at 11:23 AM, Byron Ponten wrote:

> Thanks!
> 
> I'll give this a try.   I'm a little concerned about performance if we end up plotting tens of thousands of glyphs.... we'll see.
> 
> - byron
> 
> On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Eric E. Monson <emonson at cs.duke.edu> wrote:
> Hey Byron,
> 
> This may not be exactly what you're after, but if you want something that already has selections built in and should link up easily with the Infovis stuff, take a look at vtkRenderedSurfaceRepresentation:
> 
> http://www.vtk.org/doc/nightly/html/classvtkRenderedSurfaceRepresentation.html
> 
> and the one test listed there, [vtk_source]/Views/Testing/Cxx/TestRenderView.cxx
> 
> This uses a vtkRenderView, which is the same display method as all of the Infovis stuff, and the vtkDataRepresentation subclasses have a built-in annotation link.
> 
> The selections are "cell selections", so I just tried modifying the above-mentioned test to have a point cloud instead of a sphere as one of the representations, running the point cloud through a triangle filter to create one cell for each vertex instead of the whole point cloud being one single cell, and it works fine. Here is the beginning of my hack-y TestRenderView function (I also added vtkPointSource.h and vtkTriangleFilter.h to the #includes):
> 
> int TestRenderView(int argc, char* argv[])
> {
>  VTK_CREATE(vtkAnnotationLink, link);
>  VTK_CREATE(TestRenderViewUpdater, updater);
> 
>  VTK_CREATE(vtkPointSource, pts);
>  pts->SetRadius(1);
>  pts->SetNumberOfPoints(100);
>  VTK_CREATE(vtkTriangleFilter, sphere);
>  sphere->SetInputConnection(pts->GetOutputPort());
>  VTK_CREATE(vtkCubeSource, cube);
>  cube->SetCenter(2, 0, 0);
> 
> This will not give you a very fancy 3D scatter plot, but it's pretty easy and already supports selections and should work with the view updater.
> 
> Good luck,
> -Eric
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Eric E Monson
> Duke Visualization Technology Group
> 
> 
> On Aug 25, 2010, at 1:51 PM, Byron Ponten wrote:
> 
> > New to vtk.
> >
> > Would like to sync up selections between all views (i.e. plots/tables/graphs).    For the most part we would like to use infovis views (charts, 2D scatter, etc.) but also need to create a 3D scatter plot – which I’m assuming cannot be done within the infovis arena.
> >
> > I’ve managed to link selections between “InfoVis” views by mimicking the strategy as outlined in various infovis examples.
> >
> > 1.  Creating top-level vtkAnnotationLink and vtkViewUpdater entities
> > 2.  Use SetAnnotationLink in each view’s representation
> > 3.  Adding each view to the view updater.
> >
> > So my question is, if it is indeed not possible to create a 3D scatter plot within the infovis arena (and thus have access to it’s representation), how do I connect the selection model (as maintained by the vtkAnnotationLink object) with a 3D scatter plot?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > -byron
> >
> >
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