[vtkusers] hardware accelerated offscreen rendering without diplaying window

Tue Jul 26 14:08:29 EDT 2011

Dear Adriano, Dear Aashish!

Thank you for the patch. I have tried it, and it works if I only create a single render window. But I see two issues when patching future VTK releases:

1) The patch turns off window mapping independent of the OffScreenRendering setting. Using the patch there is no possibility to map the window by calling SetOffScreenRendering(0).

2) With the patch multiple offscreen windows interfere with each other. It seems that for random frames one render window can draw into another window's pixel data. It is not reproducible which frames are corrupted and the behaviour appears to depend on other currently active processes.

I don't know how to modify the patch to work around these regression bugs. Will somebody work on a fix or should I rather change the visualisation system while I am still in the experimental phase?

Thank you
Vic

Hi,

On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 9:03 AM, Adriano Gagliardi <agagliardi at ara.co.uk> wrote:
>
> There is a patch that essentially comments out the lines of code that cause
> the X-window to pop up. I've been using it for a couple of years without
> issue:

I am wondering if people are using this patch and if it is working
then we should get this into VTK proper. I think I am volunteering
myself.

Though we have to make sure all our dashboards will pass this patch as well.

Thanks,

>
> http://www.cmake.org/pipermail/paraview/2009-December/014908.html
>
> That should have the attachement on it (HideWindow.patch).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Adriano
>
>
> ===================================
>
> Adriano Gagliardi MEng PhD
> Business Sector Leader
> Computational Aerodynamics
> Aircraft Research Association Ltd.
> Manton Lane
> Bedford
>
> Tel: 01234 32 4644
> E-mail: agagliardi at ara.co.uk
> Url: www.ara.co.uk
> -----Original Message-----
> From: vtkusers-bounces at vtk.org [mailto:vtkusers-bounces at vtk.org] On Behalf
> Of Peter Schiemann
> Sent: 26 July 2011 13:47
> To: vtkusers at vtk.org
> Subject: Re: [vtkusers] hardware accelerated offscreen rendering without
> diplaying window
>
> Hello Victor,
> with VTK you only have the choice of either accelerated rendering on a
> physical display or software rendering which can be off screen. There has
> been no attempt to support pure off screen with hardware support for several
> years. As you say, the best alternative is Visit. What you need works out of
> the box.
> If you need a solution in VTK, study the class vtkXOpenGLRenderWindow.cxx
> and find out why it pops up an unnecessary window although set to offscreen.
> I was told it is not difficult, but I am not familiar with X windows
> programming.
>
> Good luck!
> Peter
>
>
>>Dear VTK gurus!
>>
>>I was wondering about the status of hardware accelerated offscreen
> rendering in VTK *without* displaying an X window on the server (linux
> operating systems).
>>
>>If this is possible, can somebody please document the CMake settings and a
> usage example in the VTK Wiki?
>>
>>There have been several discussion threads on this issue, but I found
>>no solution. They all gave up at some point. I guess
>>http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Examples
>>/Cxx/Utilities/OffScreenRendering is the "official" example, how to render
> offscreen. But unless compiled with software rendering, it still displays an
> X window.
>>
>>If this is impossible with VTK, why?? VisIt is capable of hidden,
> accelerated offscreen rendering. SoQt can easily do it, too.
>>Is VTK designed differently, so that use of modern pbuffers or frame buffer
> objects is excluded? Then please say so, and people can make their choice.
>>
>>Thank you
>>Vic
>
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-- 
| Aashish Chaudhary
| R&D Engineer
| Kitware Inc.
| www.kitware.com
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