Hi Jeff, I don't think I will work on arbitrary orientation volume slice planes until I improve speed of flipping through axis aligned planes. Here are some comments to give you a better idea of the issues. It is currently possible to get arbitrary volume planes in two ways, using the Resample button in the subregion selection panel, or the TomoPlane Chimera extension from Karen Gross and Christophe Best. Both of these approaches are somewhat clunky. The resample button requires you to press a button to get an updated view and creates a new volume on every press. The TomoPlane tool is rather slow to update and has too complex a user interface and does not work with the latest Chimera (I'll fix that soon). The main problem is performance and user interface. Axis aligned plane display with the volume dialog planes panel is a factor of several times slower than I'd like. Improving rendering speed when changing the plane will probably be achieved by not destroying the plane model with each new orientation, using texture rendering (not done by TomoPlane), preloading full data, using 3-d opengl textures when the graphics card has sufficient memory. The user interface should be simple, but it seems it will need another mouse mode to move the plane, and maybe some ability to have more than one plane, maybe show exact plane parameters (axis or angles), maybe allow marker placement on tilted planes. Would make sense to put these parameters in the current volume plane panel, but those planes do not require a separate volume model. The titled plane will need to be a separate model from the original volume. The optimization and user interface problems are difficult. I think improving the current axis-aligned plane rendering speed is more important. Also think reducing volume memory use in "solid" mode is more important. Also think volume mask support is more important. Plus there are quite a few other less closely related projects that I think have higher priority. All this means that improved support for tilted cut planes isn't likely to get much attention for at least several months. Tom Jeff Triffo wrote:
hi folks,
anyone know if the volume plane tool will support arbitrary orientation of the plane any time soon?
-Jeff