Glyph/Array Orientation not working

ParaView Support
1

Hi,

I am having trouble generating Arrays/Glyphs with a desired orientation. I am trying to use the Transforming GUI option, which works perfectly well for translation, scale and origin changes, but any orientation changes are ignored and the array/glyph remains pointing in the +x direction (1, 0, 0).

I suspect this may be related to the issue outlined in this thread Vector glyph orient not working. The suggested solution of using the -dr option simply removes the advanced geometry representation options, so does not work for my case. I am using version 5.10.0 on Ubuntu.

Cheers,

Lachlan

2

Alternatively, I know a priori the location, direction and size of the glyphs that I want and can save these values to a text file. At the moment, I am writing these values to file in the format:

x_origin, y_origin, z_origin, x_orientation, y_orientation, z_orientation, magnitude.

How would I go about converting a text file formatted as such into a set of glyphs/arrows? The best I can find is this page, https://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Display_points_and_normals_from_a_plain_text_(x_y_z_nx_ny_nz)_file, which is really not very useful.

3

You can use the calculator-filter to generate a vector. If your file has start and end coordinates, the function would look like this: (var0-coordsX)*iHat+(var1-coordsY)*jHat+(var2-coordsZ)*kHat
(the file has coordsX, coordsY, coordsZ, var0, var1, var2 as default column names if it is read by VisItXYZReader).
You can then use the resultant vector as glypth orientation and scaling array. Set the scale factor to 1.
As this will generate arrows of varying thickness, depending on their length, you can load the arrow glyph plugin to fix that (this requires a second calculator with output 1/magnitude which can then be used as shaft radius scaling array as well as tip radius scaling array).
Good luck and cheers,
Venke

4

Thanks for the recommendation, probably easier than what I ended up doing. I ended up building a small structured data set, with points located at the point I wanted the arrows to start and attached a vector quantity to them which described the size and direction I wanted.
Cheers,

Lachlan