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Visualization

Tomviz provides a hardware accelerated visualization engine connected to a data pipeline. Upon loading data a default view will be shown of the data (a slice and an outline). Once operations are applied to the data these will move to the output of the pipeline automatically.

It is possible to visualize the original data by selecting the root (usually denoted by the name of the file loaded) and adding the desired visualization modules to it. Data can be cloned, which will create a new root with a copy of the selected data.

Tomviz saves its state every five minute which can be recovered when Tomviz next starts should the application crash or the computer have power issues. You can also save the application state by taking a snapshot of the pipeline at a given moment, note that saving state does not save data. See the data section for more details on loading/saving data and/or state.

Start and end of Tomviz pipeline

The screenshot above shows data as loaded on the left, and then a cropped view of a single nanoparticle on the right. Note the two volume modules in the pipeline placed on the original data and the output data.

Techniques

In this section, we will go over some available techniques and explain the important parameters. Most of the techniques are GPU accelerated, which requires a good graphics card that has at least 2GB memory, and ideally 16GB of system memory. Larger volumes will require more data, see data section for some discussion of typical data sizes.

Modules

Visualization modules

Visualization modules are implemented in C++ using GLSL to take full advantage of hardware acceleration. These modules are available from the visualization menu and operate on the volumes loaded/processed in the application. The toolbar is shown above, with the Visualization menu shown below, note the identical icons with brief descriptions in the menu.

Visualization menu

Views of loaded data

When Tomviz opens data it has a number of defaults. The screenshot below shows a typical view of a volume loaded, with a slice through the center of the data, an outline showing the total size of the volume, and the default Plasma color map. Histogram is calculated in the background thread and then displayed when ready in the top-right.

Default view of the data

Palette and background colors

The color palette can be modified using the button shown, and has several useful presets. The default palette can also be changed if preferred.

Visualization menu

The black background is recommended when displaying on monitors, or in some presentations, white is often better for print, web pages and etc.

Color maps

Plasma is the default color map, but the application contains a number of alternative color maps that can be used. You can invert the color maps, and also create custom color maps that can be saved for future use.

Color maps

Selecting Viridis will result in the view being modified as shown, different data can benefit from some of the alternate color maps.

Color maps

Contour

A contour along a single isovalue can be displayed in the application by double clicking on the histogram at the desired value, or by adding a contour module. The module properties has a slider where the value can be specified, a few example contours are shown below at different isovalues. Note how the color is set by the color map.

Contour

Contour

Contour

If multiple scalars are available on the data, the user is able to select both the scalars to contour by, and the scalars to color by.

Contour

Slice

Slices through the data can be added with the Slice module. The default is to show an orthogonal slice such as that shown below.

Orthogonal slice

You can set the direction to Custom in order to slice through at any angle.

Slice

Outline

The outline module principally shows the extents of the volume, and can be useful to see how far the volume extends. There are a few other options available in the module properties. Clicking on Show Axes will show the axes, and clicking on Show Grid will add a grid as shown below.

Outline

Ruler

Rulers can be used to measure distances in the scene. The start and end point can be selected interactively, and the length is displayed.

Outline

Threshold

The Threshold module will display all voxels between the specified minimum and maximum values. The bounds are specified in the properties panel for the module.

Threshold

The two screenshots show two distinct ranges as selected in the properties panel shown.

Threshold

Clip

Clipping planes can be added to the data in order to clip any applied Slice, Volume, or Contour modules. The default is an orthogonal plane, but its direction can be changed and the plane can be inverted to allow for clipping from any direction.

Inverted clip plane

The direction can be set to Custom to clip at any angle, and the plane color and opacity can also be changed to fit your needs.

Nonortho clip plane

Planes and arrows can also be toggled off for clearer views of the clipped data.

Hidden clip planes

Color Bar and Opacity Editor

Histogram Widget

The color map, histogram, and opacity function are combined in the widget in the top-right corner of the application display. The color map works primarily with the slice module and volume rendering, and the opacity function works primarily with volume rendering.

The rectangular bar at the bottom is the color bar. New nodes can be added by clicking the color bar, nodes can be deleted via the "Delete" key, they can be moved by dragging them, and they can be re-colored by double left-clicking them.

The line at the top represents the opacity function. New nodes may be added by clicking on the function, they may be deleted via the "Delete" key, and they may be moved by dragging them. Nodes can be dragged up (more opaque) and down (less opaque) and side-to-side to change the scalar value to which they apply.

Color Space

The color space may be changed by selecting the gear icon on the right side of the histogram.

Brightness and Contrast

The brightness and contrast may be edited by selecting the grayscale icon on the right side of the histogram. This is primarily intended for grayscale color maps, but can be used for other color maps as well.

Brightness and Contrast Editor

Brightness and Contrast Original

Adjusting the brightness shifts the color bar and opacity left and right. Adjusting the contrast makes the color bar and opacity widths shrink and expand.

The "Auto" button may be pressed to automatically adjust the brightness and contrast to the data range based on certain thresholds.

Brightness and Contrast Auto

Repeatedly pressing the "Auto" button increases the threshold that is used, and thus increases the contrast as well.

Volume Rendering

Tomviz uses volume rendering provided by VTK that utilizes graphics processing units (GPUs) to accelerate rendering and achieve maximum performance. It needs to upload the volume as a 3D texture, and offers a number of rendering options that will be described and demonstrated. The default settings of the volume renderer with the default color map and opacity look like the image below.

Volume render default

Color Map and Opacity

The combined color map, histogram, opacity function widget is closely integrated with the volume renderer.

The screenshot below shows the impact on the volume renderer of adding an opacity node, and setting it to zero such that all values below about 10,000 are fully transparent. This tends to remove most of the "background" values that dominate in the default image with just two nodes. The transparency linearly interpolates between points

Volume render opacity

Background color

The color palette can be manipulated by clicking on the artist palette icon in the toolbar. The screenshots below show the white and black palettes and their impact on the volume rendering without any other changes.

Volume render black

Volume render white

Empty space and cropping

Making the outline module visible by adding it (or clicking on the eyeball) will show the total extent of the volume. Once we have found suitable opacity points it is clear that quite a bit of the space is empty.

Volume render outline

You can access the Crop operator from the Data Transforms menu, and interactively crop the volume. This can be done numerically in the dialog or interactively in the 3D view. The screenshot below shows an example of the crop operator in action, this is a C++ operator developed to be highly interactive.

Volume render crop

You can either type the desired extents into the dialog, or drag the spherical handles to move the planes in or out.

Volume render crop

Volume render crop

When the desired values are set, click on OK to finish the cropping, you can also click Apply to see the result but keep the dialog open to interactively update the crop values until you are happy with them.

Volume render crop

Rendering Properties

The volume renderer properties are in the properties panel when the volume module is selected in the pipeline browser. The panel is shown below with the default options selected.

Volume render properties

The following screenshots only modify the options in the volume renderer properties panel. The default options produce the following result:

Volume render default

Turning Ray Jittering off does not look very different with this dataset, but in others the jittering can remove what looks like a wood grain pattern.

Volume render no jitter

Turning lighting on can have quite a marked effecf, it adds shadows, highlights and other related lighting benefits. It often needs enough opacity to be used for the shadows and surface to offer the additional depth shown below.

Volume render lighting

The Max Intensity blending mode (Composite is default) enables you to see the core of the structure more easily. In this case there is a lot more high intensity that is typically hidden.

Volume render max intensity

The 1D transfer function highlights surfaces using gradient opacity to modulate the volume rendered image.

Volume render 1D transfer

The 2D transfer also highlights the surfaces/high rates of change but can offer the ability to be more selective. The volume must be quite well behaved to exhibit enough structure to be amenable to this approach.

Volume render 2D transfer

The 2D transfer function features a box using the main color map with its opacity values, and that box can be moved around to select specific regions of scalar value and gradient magnitude.

Volume render 2D transfer

Visualizing RGB Volumes

When multi-component image data is loaded (see Merging Data for an example), the volume visualization will by default display the magnitude of the data.

If 3-component image data is loaded, a "Use RGBA Mapping" checkbox will appear in the volume panel. If this setting is checked, then the three components of the data will be mapped to the red, green and blue channels, respecitvely, and the color map will be ignored. The magnitude of the 3 channels is then used alongside the opacity editor to compute the opacity of the volume.

If checked, an RGBA Mapping Range will appear below it.

Volume RGBA Mapping Options

This indicates the data range that will get mapped to the RGB range. The sliders can be adjusted to remove noise from the visualization in order to primarily display the true signal.

Volume RGBA Mapping

Exporting Visualizations

Tomviz offers a number of options to export the visualizations created in the application.

Export screenshot

From the same File menu, you can choose Export Screenshot. The dialog lets you specify the size of the image to export and supports most standard image formats. You can override palette, the use of the transparent background can be especially useful in presentations for example.

Screenshot

Export movie

The movie defaults to producing an orbit around the volume using the scene in the current view. You can set the resolution before saving and the color palette as above. It is Export Movie in the File menu, and supports a number of common movie formats.

Movie

Export to web

The option to export to web is useful to go beyond a simple movie, and offer an interactive element that can be shared in any modern web browser. By default it generates images statically, and the HTML page can be opened in almost any browser, with limited interactivity.

Web

It is usually better to use a geometry based export, but that requires a more modern web browser that supports WebGL. You often need to downsample the data in order to view it in a browser, and offer better interactivity. You can set it to use an external data file that can be used in larger web pages, or an integrated HTML page that can be emailed as a single object/hosted.

An example after successfully exporting the data to web may look like

Web

Export mesh for 3D printing

Contours of the data set with a specific value can be exported to an STL mesh file by right-clicking on Contour inside the Pipelines browser as shown below. You should choose Export as Mesh and choose where to save the mesh to.

Export mesh from contour

Export image from slice

A similar capability is offered in the slice widget, where you can right-click the Slice and select Export as image from the context menu. You can choose where to save the image, and it will be exported as a flat image sharing the dimensions of that slice through the volume in the case of orthogonal slices.

Export mesh from slice

Image Viewer Mode

Under the "View" menu, there is an option to enter "Image Viewer Mode".

Image viewer mode essentially sets up the main window, the modules, and the view so that the user can more easily scroll through and visualize the data as a stack of images.

Image Viewer Mode

Enabling image viewer mode does the following:

  1. Sets the projection to orthographic
  2. Sets the interaction mode to 2D
  3. Resets the view direction to -Z
  4. Finds a slice module, or creates one. Show it, and hide all other modules.
  5. Zooms the camera so the slice fits the window
  6. Places a slider below the render window for selecting the slice to view

When image viewer mode is disabled, most of the settings and the view will be restored to what they were before image viewer mode was enabled.