Rendering Strategies

This page lists proposals for rendering shapes.

Classes instances (cells)

Class instances are an important shape that will be very prominent in the visualization because they represent the components our code is made of. Cells are the shape associated to them. How do we render cells?

Requirements

The final rendering should at least keep into account the following conditions:

• Instances of different classes should look different.
• Different instances of the same class should look similar. The definition of similar is to be further worked on.

Proposals

A possible representation meeting the requirements can be:

For the sake of simplicity, cells can be rendered as polyhedra whose surface is transparent and having, at the center, a glowing sphere. The number of vertices is determined by the number of fields the class has. If the class has a number of fields lower than 3, then a sphere is used.

The problems that need solved are:

1. Algorithms for building convex hulls
2. Convex hull algorithms
3. Creating meshes from points

A more advanced proposal can be:

Cells are represented by star-tree where the leaves are the fields of the class. The structure is enveloped in a transparent membrane whose shape depends on the number and types of fields.