We’re working on a bit of a crossover effort between ParaView and LidarView where we’d like to have access to some ParaView features while using LidarView. One specific case is that we’d like to connect LidarView to a “pvserver” program.
I was looking through the CMake options for ParaView to see whether there is a flag that enable “pvserver”, but other thing things like “VTK_MODULE_ENABLE_ParaView_RemotingClientServerStream” I’m not finding anything – is that the flag, or is “pvserver” just always compiled?
Either way, the ultimate question is how to use “pvserver” (or equivalent) with LidarView?
We decided to add the Connect and Disconnect buttons (in the File menu) to LidarView in this MR.
Since LidarView is a ParaView-based application with additional plugins, you can use the standard pvserver with LidarView as long as the same ParaView version was used to compile LidarView. However, it will require manually loading the LidarView plugins on the server.
To simplify the process, we created a lvserver executable that behaves like pvserver but automatically loads plugins. It should be available on the LidarView master branch and in the nightly packages available here (starting from tonight).
Hope this helps - let me know if you encounter any issues or bugs,
Timothée Couble
Note: LidarView in client/server mode is experimental and untested for now. You may find some bugs, especially if you try to record a LiDAR stream.
Thank you @Timothee_Couble. We will try out tonight’s nightly build. (We’re not recording Lidar streams, so that part will not be an issue for us.)
I’d like to ask one followup question for clarification. You mention a “LidarView” plugin – does that imply that it’s also possible to simply add LidarView capabilities to ParaView with the normal desktop interface if we just enable that plugin when building ParaView?
Yes, it is possible to load LidarView plugins in ParaView (as long LidarView is built under same ParaView version).
The simplest way to do that is to change the paraview.conf file next to paraview executable and add the path to lidarview.plugins.xml file. It should be in:
<lidarview_package>/lib/lidarview/plugins/ for linux
<lidarview_package>/bin/lidarview/plugins/ for windows
You could also load each LidarView plugins individually with the Tools > Manage Plugins dialog.
Note: you might need to copy few dependency .dll on windows