[vtkusers] animation while renderer responsive

[aborsic at ne-scientific.com]

Hi Ken, Elvis,

 

I have one question: the VTK User’s Guide covers in detail multithreading approaches based on streaming datasets across different execution paths. I am not aware (and perhaps I am mistaken) of a unified discussion / documentation for approaches to parallelism where parts of a pipeline are executed by different threads, as in the case discussed here.

 

Am I wrong in this? Is there any documentation / resource that you would suggest reading? For example, where is it possible too find the requirement that the AddActor() and Render() calls should be made by the main thread?

 

Thanks for any advice,

 

Best Regards,

 

Andrea

 

 

 

From: vtkusers <vtkusers-bounces at vtk.org> On Behalf Of Ken Martin
Sent: Wednesday, May 9, 2018 11:07 AM
To: Elvis Stansvik <elvis.stansvik at orexplore.com>
Cc: VTK Users <vtkusers at vtk.org>
Subject: Re: [vtkusers] animation while renderer responsive

 

Elvis is right. Load the data, Update() the reader/pipeline (which forces the pipeline to actually run). You can even create the mapper/actor etc if you want. All in another thread. But adding the actor to the renderer and rendering must be done in the main thread and there will be a pause as the graphics objects get built and uploaded to the GPU but at least it will be shorter as the file IO etc has already been done. 

 

Some of the building of the graphics objects could also be done in the other thread with some (possibly significant) coding changes to VTK which would further reduce any hiccups.

 

 

On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 10:26 AM, Elvis Stansvik <elvis.stansvik at orexplore.com <mailto:elvis.stansvik at orexplore.com> > wrote:

2018-05-09 16:09 GMT+02:00 Sam Raby <rabysam28 at gmail.com <mailto:rabysam28 at gmail.com> >:
> Hello, I have a vtkPolyData that I can display fine. Every half a second
> another vrkplydata comes in, so I need to display the new vtkpolydata
> instead of the old one, and so forth. It is essentially like an animation
> but the incoming vtkploydata are different in size and content, so I cannot
> use the same vtkpolydata object every time.
>
> Is there an example so I see how to approach this? One requirement is that
> as this animation is displayed I need to be able to still interact with the
> scene such as zoom in and out. So it needs to be an unblocking call.

I think that everything up to the AddActor(..) and Render() calls on
the renderer can be made in a different thread. But the AddActor(..)
and Render() calls must be made from the main (GUI) thread (please
someone correct me if I'm wrong).

So your GUI will be blocked for some time, depending on how much time
those two calls take for your polydata.

In our application we also have this problem, but we're working with
volumes (not polydata). The GUI should ideally be fully responsive
while a volume is being added to the renderer, but it will freeze for
some hundred ms or so. I don't think there's a way around this. We do
the reading/creation of the volume pipeline in a separate thread, but
still the adding of the volume to the renderer and the subsequent
first render will take some time.

Elvis

>
> Thanks
> -s
>
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Ken Martin PhD

Distinguished Engineer
Kitware Inc.

101 East Weaver Street
Carrboro, North Carolina
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