[SOLVED] 3D shaped nodes in preview mode?

[seinecle]

Hi,

I wondered if it was on agenda of the GEPHI team to enable 3D-shaped nodes / other complex visual effects in the preview mode?

I find visualization just awesome in the "overview mode" (3D, light effects on the nodes...), and it's a pity that all that is lost when exporting to pdf and svg!

Any feedback on that?

Thx!

Clement

[mbastian]

Hi, this is currently not in the agenda, what kind of complex visual effects would you like to have? Preview is vectorial and effects should therefore be shapes or gradients only.

A workaround to this problem is to add these effects in a editor, like Inkscape or Illustrator.

[seinecle]

I was thinking mainly about 3D shapes and light effects on nodes. It is not just about loving fancy 3D: it really helps getting an intuition of the spatial, 3 axis configuration of the network.

Ok, I suppose that all that can be added with Inkscape at a later stage, but:

- from my experience, a lot of admiration and "stunning effect" of Gephi when I present data with it to audiences comes from the visual effects in the overview mode, not from the Preview mode. Shifting back between "Disk 2D" and "Sphere 3D" shows clearly that the 3D effect adds a lot to the sophistication of the visualization. To the extent that for some presentations, I take snapshots of the overview mode, not using the preview mode! (despite the low resolution of the screen shots).

- the solution to improve the picture later with Inscape is not very appealing: there is already so much pre and post processing for graph representations that it becomes very heavy to add yet another layer of visual work...

Maybe that a solution could be to improve the snapshot function in the overview? It is almost ready, but would just need a much better color fidelity (which seem inexistent for the moment) for the color of nodes, but also edges, text of labels, etc.

Also, it would be nice to have the possibility to keep proportions when choosing the vertical and horizontal resolution of the snapshot (ie, if I double 1024, then 768 is automatically doubled).

I hope this could be done without too much trouble.

Best,

Clement

[admin]

Just about the screenshot resolution, you can take them in high-res. See the visualization tutorial here, slide 17, it's up to 16000x16000px and AA16x.

[mbastian]

from my experience, a lot of admiration and "stunning effect" of Gephi when I present data with it to audiences comes from the visual effects in the overview mode, not from the Preview mode. Shifting back between "Disk 2D" and "Sphere 3D" shows clearly that the 3D effect adds a lot to the sophistication of the visualization. To the extent that for some presentations, I take snapshots of the overview mode, not using the preview mode! (despite the low resolution of the screen shots).

This is not easy to do, as the result has to be the same in Processing (Preview applet), SVG and PDF in order to be consistent. But the main problem is that this is currently not possible to do with a plugin. The Preview module hasn't be done in a modular way in the first place and the entire architecture of Preview has to be redone. That limits the will to make any new feature in Preview for the moment.

Maybe that a solution could be to improve the snapshot function in the overview? It is almost ready, but would just need a much better color fidelity (which seem inexistent for the moment) for the color of nodes, but also edges, text of labels, etc.

Could you give more detail about this problem? Is this related to the 'transparent backround' issue described here ?

Also, it would be nice to have the possibility to keep proportions when choosing the vertical and horizontal resolution of the snapshot (ie, if I double 1024, then 768 is automatically doubled).

I added this to Ideas

[seinecle]

Indeed, the faulty rendering or colors is related to transparent background - I should have spotted that it was a bug already reported.

So, the screenshot basically works, which allows to export 3D renderings. Great!!