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CDAT / vcs

Visualization Control System
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improve appearance for vector plots #133

Closed danlipsa closed 5 years ago

danlipsa commented 7 years ago

Compare output from vcs test_vcs_basic_streamline_transparent to output from ParaView vector

durack1 commented 7 years ago

@danlipsa looks like you pressed save before the uploading had finished..

danlipsa commented 7 years ago

@durack1 github is having troubles uploading pngs. It says: "Something went really wrong, and we can’t process that file." I tried with both chrome and safari. I will try this tomorrow.

danlipsa commented 7 years ago

@durack1 Maybe this is the reason: http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/02/28/amazons-cloud-service-goes-down-sites-scramble/98530914/

danlipsa commented 7 years ago

@durack1 Now things are back to normal.

aashish24 commented 7 years ago

Compare output from vcs

@danlipsa two things:

  1. Spacing
  2. Scaling

You can control these two in vcs but I agree that by default we do not do a good job with it. And hence we draw too many and too small. Also, we do not color them.

danlipsa commented 7 years ago

@aashish24 I think the reasons vectors look worst in vcs are:

Of course, ParaView also colors the arrows and scales them with the vector magnitude.

durack1 commented 7 years ago

@danlipsa having the ability to plot the second (paraview) image using VCS would be pretty cool, I agree that it's a prettier format.. It would also be nice to be able to plot the old versions too.. so a "3d vector (paraview)" along with a "vector (current vcs default)"

chaosphere2112 commented 7 years ago

@danlipsa @durack1 We can already do 3D vectors (by using the cunningly titled "3d_vector" graphics method, courtesy of our friends at NASA). Changing the 2D vectors to be the same as the 3D vectors would be a bit odd.

durack1 commented 7 years ago

@chaosphere2112 are there any examples of these in the gallery? If no, it would be great to add them.. And how do they compare to the paraview version above?

chaosphere2112 commented 7 years ago

screen shot 2017-02-28 at 3 32 10 pm

This is with a minimal amount of futzing. It allows interactive selection of the vertical level, and a number of other customizations.

There is an example in the gallery: http://uvcdat.llnl.gov/examples/vcs3D_wnd_vector.html

durack1 commented 7 years ago

@chaosphere2112 nice! The page http://uvcdat.llnl.gov/examples/vcs3D_wnd_vector.html doesn't seem to have a valid image to me, a permissions issue maybe?

chaosphere2112 commented 7 years ago

Looks fine to me... permissions shouldn't break across different computers. Try reloading?

durack1 commented 7 years ago

@chaosphere2112 weird, whatever you did it's fine now..

jypeter commented 7 years ago

Guys, remember that for a 2D publication with precise results, we rather need something like the old but trusted vcs plot, where you can easily have axes, titles, variable name, min/max, etc... If the data is too dense, I usually sub-sample the data with _x.plot(vectmethod, var[::5, ::5]) and possibly use slightly longer arrows

I don't have that many plots with vectors in store, but the following one, from 2008, does not look that bad tas_wind_pmip2_0k_oa_jja

On the other hand, it's true that being able to specify the color of the individual vectors could be useful in some cases.

I have also added below a vector plot I made a year ago, using... basemap

jjas_wind950

danlipsa commented 7 years ago

There is an example in the gallery: http://uvcdat.llnl.gov/examples/vcs3D_wnd_vector.html

@chaosphere2112 Nice! Can you have axes labels as well? Lighting seems off in that example.

danlipsa commented 7 years ago

@jypeter Thanks for the feedback. @aashish24 @doutriaux1 To improve our vector plots compared with basemap seems we need to (besides spacing and scaling):

danlipsa commented 7 years ago

@aashish24 @doutriaux1 It seems you you need to sub-sample the data to get the right spacing. Is there an option to the vector plot to specify spacing?

jypeter commented 7 years ago

For the record, I have already spent a full frustrating day trying to make a nice vector plot with 2.8.0: #187

Maybe I should have put my rambling in this thread

doutriaux1 commented 5 years ago

duplicate of #187