General Module Function
Display of Illuminated Lines using texture mapped illumination model on polylines with line halo and animation effects.
Prerequisites
This module requires OpenGL rendering to be selected. This module utilizes special OpenGL calls to implement the illuminated line technique. If this module is used with another renderer, such as the software renderer or the Output_Images module (not set to Automatic), lines will be drawn in the default mode with illuminated line features disabled.
Module Input Ports
This module requires the input mesh to contain one Polyline cell set. Any other type of cell set will be rejected, and any additional cell sets will be ignored. Any scalar node data may be present, or none for purely geometric display.
Module Output Ports
illuminated_lines has one output port that connects to the viewer.
Module Control Panel
The user interface is shown above and detailed descriptions of each parameters are given below.
Animation Parameters
Progress : This slider displays the progress of the animation and (when not Running) allows you direct control of the animation by moving the slider in real-time.
Run : This toggle enables the animation loop to run.
Cycle : If enabled, the animation loop continues forever in a cyclic fashion. If unset, the animation stops after once complete cycle. This is similar to the cycle parameter of the "Loop" module.
Reset Time : This is one-shot control to reset the animation to the start of a cycle
Data Component allows you to choose which data component of your incoming lines you wish to color by. When input is from streamlines, the choices are velocity, time and distance.
Animation Effects
Ramped / Stepped This choice selects the style of effect variation. Stair creates a linearly increasing or decreasing value, while step makes a binary chop effect. In Ramped mode, the blending can be selected to start small then get big, or the reverse or both. The values are down, up, up & down respectively. Stepped causes abrupt changes in effect.
Animated Length This slider sets the length of the effect along the polyline.
Animation Spacing This slider sets the spacing between effects along the line.
Modulate Opacity In this mode the line segment varies in transparency from completely transparent to opaque.
Modulate Width In this mode the line width is varied between 1 (very thin) to fat, based on the effect modes and shape controls.
Reverse Effect As the animation effect is applied between two zones, such as the dash and the space between the dash, this toggle reverses the area where the effect is applied.
Halo Parameters
Halo Width The width control for the halo effect defines the size of the transparent mask region added to the edge of each line. A value of zero turns off the halo effect.
Illuminated Lines Shading Model
Ambient Lighting This value provides a base shadow value, a constant added to all shading values.
Diffuse Lighting Pure diffuse reflection term, amount of shading dependent on light angle
Specular Highlights Amount of specular reflection hi-lights based on light and viewer angle
Specular Focus Tightness of specular reflection, low values are dull, wide reflections, high values are small spot reflections.
Line Width Controls line width. Normal 1-pixel lines are 1, can be increased in whole increments. Wide lines are drawn in 2D screen space, not full 3D ribbons. If you want full ribbons, use streamline module ribbon mode.
Line Opacity Variable transparency of all lines. A value of 1.0 is fully opaque, while a value of zero makes lines invisible.
Data Color Blending If node data is present, this controls the relative mix of data color and shading color. A value of zero sets full contribution of data color, while at 1.0 no data color is used and the line shade is dominated by illumination effects.
Smooth Shading This enables an additional interpolation mode for blended node data colors. In the off state, data is sampled once per line segment. When enabled, linear interpolation is used between end points of each segment. This can be helpful if large gradients are present on low resolution polylines.
Antialias This effect, sometimes called "smooth lines" blends the drawing of lines to create a smooth effect, reducing the effects of "jaggies" at pixel resolution.
Sort Trans This mode assists visual quality when transparency or antialiasing modes are used, helping to reduce artifacts caused by non-depth sorted line crossings.
Example
An example of the output from illuminated_lines is shown below.
