How to render spheres from points (these notes have been adapted from Yade’s on-line manual).
1. Rendering spherical particles using Glyphs
When importing simulated particles (generated for example by Liggghts or Yade) they will appear as points. To make them look as spheres, you have to add “glyph” to the imported points in the Paraview Pipeline browser using the “Glyph” icon (or in the menu “Filters -> Alphabetical -> Glyph”). Then set (in the Object inspector):
- “Glyph type” to Sphere
- “Radius” to 1
- “Scale mode” to Scalar (Scalar is set above to be the radii value saved in the file, therefore spheres with radius 1 will be scaled by their true radius)
- “Set scale factor” to 1
- optionally uncheck “Mask points” and “Random mode” (they make some particles not to be rendered for performance reasons, controlled by the “Maximum Number of Points”)
After clicking “Apply”, spheres will appear. They will be rendered over the original white points, which you can disable by clicking on the eye icon next to the original points in the Pipeline browser.
2. Rendering spherical particles using PointSprite
A less RAM demanding solution to display spheres is using the PointSprite plugin.
- “Tools -> Manage Plugins”
- “PointSprite_Plugin -> Load selected -> Close”
- Load VTU-files
- “Representation -> Point Sprite”
- “Point Sprite -> Scale By -> radii”
- “Edit Radius Transfer Function -> Proportional -> Multiplier = 1.0 -> Close”