# Apply texture to 3D glyphs to visualize particle orientation

**URL:** https://discourse.paraview.org/t/apply-texture-to-3d-glyphs-to-visualize-particle-orientation/16390
**Category:** Feature Requests
**Created:** [March 27, 2025, 8:30am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/apply-texture-to-3d-glyphs-to-visualize-particle-orientation/16390 "2025-03-27T08:30:57Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![Roman](https://discourse.paraview.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/ed8c4c/32.png) [@Roman](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/Roman)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2025, 8:30am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/apply-texture-to-3d-glyphs-to-visualize-particle-orientation/16390/1 "2025-03-27T08:30:57Z")

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I have a table of point coordinates and orientation vectors (or quaternions) that represent the location and orientation of spherical particles coming from a DEM simulation. To show them as such, I apply the 3D Glyphs representation with Sphere as the Glyph Type. This works like a charm.

Then I would like to show how the particles are oriented in space by applying a texture to each glyph that should follow the particle orientation. However, this does not seem to be implemented yet. I’ve tried applying the TextureMaptoSphere filter and loading the texture image, but the particles still appear untextured.

See this preceding discussion:  
[https://discourse.paraview.org/t/show-particle-orientation-with-texture](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/show-particle-orientation-with-texture)

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### Author: ![mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/user_avatar/discourse.paraview.org/mwestphal/32/17_2.png) [@mwestphal](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/mwestphal)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2025, 8:31am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/apply-texture-to-3d-glyphs-to-visualize-particle-orientation/16390/2 "2025-03-27T08:31:57Z")

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This should be as simple as keeping the source tcoords around when using GlyphWithCustomSource.

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<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![Roman](https://discourse.paraview.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/r/ed8c4c/32.png) [@Roman](https://discourse.paraview.org/u/Roman)
#### Post date: [June 6, 2025, 10:40am UTC](https://discourse.paraview.org/t/apply-texture-to-3d-glyphs-to-visualize-particle-orientation/16390/3 "2025-06-06T10:40:43Z")

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Will that be as simple as substituting `outputPD->CopyTCoordsOff();` for `outputPD->CopyTCoordsOn();` in line 234 of [VTK/Filters/Core/vtkGlyph3D.cxx](https://github.com/Kitware/VTK/blob/master/Filters/Core/vtkGlyph3D.cxx)?

I strangely can’t seem to find any definition or declaration of either of these functions anywhere in the source code…