Eye Dome Lighting

Eye Dome Lighting#

Eye-Dome Lighting (EDL) is a non-photorealistic, image-based shading technique designed to improve depth perception in scientific visualization images. To learn more, please see this blog post.

import pyvista as pv
from pyvista import examples

Point Cloud#

When plotting a simple point cloud, it can be difficult to perceive depth. Take this Lidar point cloud for example:

point_cloud = examples.download_lidar()
point_cloud

PolyData (0x7ff579dff880)
  N Cells:    3392091
  N Points:   3392091
  N Strips:   0
  X Bounds:   4.809e+05, 4.811e+05
  Y Bounds:   4.400e+06, 4.400e+06
  Z Bounds:   1.754e+03, 1.787e+03
  N Arrays:   1

And now plot this point cloud as-is:

# Plot a typical point cloud with no EDL
pl = pv.Plotter()
pl.add_mesh(point_cloud, color="tan", point_size=5)
pl.show()

Static Scene

Interactive Scene

We can improve the depth mapping by enabling eye dome lighting on the renderer with pyvista.Renderer.enable_eye_dome_lighting().

Try plotting that point cloud with Eye-Dome-Lighting yourself below:

pl = pv.Plotter()
pl.add_mesh(point_cloud, color="tan", point_size=5)
pl.enable_eye_dome_lighting()  # Turn on eye dome lighting here
pl.show()

Static Scene

Interactive Scene

The eye dome lighting mode can also handle plotting scalar arrays. Try the above block but by specifying a scalars array instead of color in the add_mesh call.

pl = pv.Plotter()
pl.add_mesh(point_cloud, scalars="Elevation", point_size=5)
pl.enable_eye_dome_lighting()  # Turn on eye dome lighting here
pl.show()