"add-vertex" button volume viewer
Please forgive and ignore my earlier post. I should have read the manual first. These features are already implemented. I'm sorry. However there are some user-interface issues... In particular, the method for adding and deleting points to the transfer function that determines voxel opacity and color could be more intuitive. (CTRL-click) This can have a big impact. I suggest putting small add-vertex, cut-vertex buttons near the histogram graph (see attatchment #1). (I stole these icons from xv) The results of using multiple vertices to control colors and or brightness-levels are strikingly better than using just two points. It would be good to make it obvious from the user interface that this option is available. Also, each time the user adds another vertex, a new color should be chosen, not the default white, in order to clue the user that the color can be changed. Similarly, it would be good to explicitly have an "add surface" "delete surface" buttons in solid or mesh mode. (No icon necessary, just write the names out in the buttons themselves itself). So go ahead and leave CTRL-Click in, but add buttons to make it explicit, and make the default color change each time a new vertex (or isosurface) is added. I've played with volume-viewer for quite a while, without realizing these options were available. (RTFM, I know...) And these features are _cool_. For example, attatchment#2 is an image of the same phage-T4 shown in the chimera image gallery using multiple colors. I like it a little better than the static grey image that Steve McQuinn made for the image gallery. http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/ImageGallery/entries/phageT4/phageT4c.jpg Again, I apologize for my earlier email. Anyway, cheers Andrew okay, back to work...
Hi Andrew, Those are good user interface ideas. Along the lines of your suggestions, I think providing an initial colormap that has more nodes (maybe 3, 4, or 5), and multi-colored (maybe rainbow), would better show off the volume rendering capability. The currrent white cotton ball you see by default in solid rendering mode is not very useful. That said, I have yet to see a compelling advantage for the solid rendering in molecular structure applications over surface rendering. It is true that 3D medical image scans often are shown with volume rendering, but that data has different characteristics. Since I have no examples where the solid rendering has proved very effective, enhancing it has low priority. Still I will keep your color map user interface suggestions in mind with the new surface colormapping tool (not yet released) that uses the same histogram interface. And we also use that histogram interface with the "Render attributes" tool. Thanks for the suggestions, Tom
Yeah, the demand for 3-D voxell images may be low at the moment. But I would still consider adding some kind of "add-surface" button to volume-viewer when in surface or mesh-mode. Steve McQuinn made a very pretty picture of phageT4 using a red colored surface in the interior, and a green one on the exterior and it is pretty. (I hope having multiple surfaces doesn't cause end-capping to crash.) Andrew I'll try to keep it down to a dull roar for a little while. On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Thomas Goddard wrote:
Hi Andrew,
Those are good user interface ideas. Along the lines of your suggestions, I think providing an initial colormap that has more nodes (maybe 3, 4, or 5), and multi-colored (maybe rainbow), would better show off the volume rendering capability. The currrent white cotton ball you see by default in solid rendering mode is not very useful.
That said, I have yet to see a compelling advantage for the solid rendering in molecular structure applications over surface rendering. It is true that 3D medical image scans often are shown with volume rendering, but that data has different characteristics.
Since I have no examples where the solid rendering has proved very effective, enhancing it has low priority.
Still I will keep your color map user interface suggestions in mind with the new surface colormapping tool (not yet released) that uses the same histogram interface. And we also use that histogram interface with the "Render attributes" tool.
Thanks for the suggestions,
Tom
participants (2)
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Andrew Jewett -
Thomas Goddard