3.1.6 Viewer Window


The 3D viewer plays a central role in Amira. Here all geometric objects are shown in 3D space. The 3D viewer offers powerful and fast interaction techniques. It can be regarded as a virtual camera which can be moved to an arbitrary position within the 3D scene. The left mouse button is used to change the view direction by means of a virtual trackball. The middle mouse button is used for panning, while the left and the middle mouse button pressed together allow you to zoom objects.

Sometimes you need to manipulate objects directly in the 3D viewer. For example, this technique, called 3D interaction, is used by the
transform editor. The editor provides special draggers that can be picked and translated or rotated in order to specify the transformation of a data object. Before you can interact with these draggers, you must switch the viewer into interaction mode. This is done by clicking on the arrow button in the upper right corner. If the viewer is in interaction mode, the mouse cursor will be an arrow instead of a hand symbol. You can use the [ESC] key in order to quickly switch between interaction mode and viewing mode. If the viewer is in interaction mode, use the [Alt] key to temporarily switch to viewing mode.

  Figure 31: Amira's viewer window provides a virtual trackball for easy navigation. The decoration frame contains several controls, allowing you for example to switch between viewing mode and interaction mode, to choose certain orienations, or to take snapshots.

More than one viewer can be active at a time. Standard screen layouts with one, two, or four viewers can be selected via the view menu. Additional viewers can be created using the Tcl command viewer <n> show, where <n> is an integer number between 0 and 15. While viewers 0 to 3 will be placed in a common panel window, viewers 4 to 15 will create their own top-level window. For more specific control, the viewer provides an extensive command set, which is documented below.

The decoration of the viewer window provides several buttons and controls, see Figure 31. The precise meaning of these controls is described below.

In addition to theses buttons the Amira viewers provide an extensive set of Tcl commands, which are listed in the next section.


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