A high-speed three.js substrate for visualizing biofidelic data
A Layer is a subset of objects and interactability that can be placed in a Visualizer scene.
If you are implementing your own Layer, you should provide the following:
requestInit: (THREE.Scene)This is run whenever the Visualizer requests that the layer be fully
re-rendered from scratch. Override this function with your own layer’s
code for creating objects and adding them to scene. Be courteous and
either (1) add these objects to the this.children array, or (2) ALSO
override this.clearChildren with code to remove any objects that this
layer makes from the scene.
Arguments:
scene (THREE.Scene): The scene in which objects reside.requestRender: (THREE.Scene)This is run whenever the Visualizer requests that the layer be partially
re-rendered (useful in cases where you simply need to update a material
or position, but don’t need to completely regenerate the entire mesh).
Override this function with your own layer’s code for updating existing
objects from this.children.
Arguments:
scene (THREE.Scene): The scene in which objects reside.Returns:
boolean: True if a re-render was performed; false if not. This is simply a courtesy to other listeners, and does not affect the render loop. Note that in future versions, a layer that rarely returns true may have its requestRender function less frequently called.rescale: ([Number, Number, Number]) → [Number, Number, Number]Convert layer-space into global space. For instance, if your images are
10x10 but need to be half the size when rendered, this should return
[xyz[0]/2, xyz[1]/2, xyz[2]/2].
By default, this performs no rescale (i.e., it returns xyz).
Arguments:
xyz (array): [x, y, z] point, in global space.Returns:
[x, y, z]clearChildrenYou may choose to implement a clearChildren function as well. This is run by default when the Layer is removed from the Scene, but you may also call it internally to clear all objects from scene.children that should not exist after the layer is removed.
This is only a courtesy to prevent memory-leaks, orphaned 3D objects, or stale object references; it will not affect the Visualizer’s render loop.
By default, this removes all items in Layer#children, so if you choose not to implement this function, you may opt to only ever add objects to the scene that have been added to the children array; then, cleanup is done for you.