SVI Support Wiki Pages

Fast MIP renderer

The Maximum Intensity Projection (MIP) Renderer is part of the Huygens Essential since release 2.6.0p4 and enables you to obtain a spatial projection of your 3D microscopy data from the pointview you wish.

The renderer projects, in the visualization plane, the VoXels with maximum intensity that fall in the way of parallel rays traced from the viewpoint to the plane of projection. Notice that this implies that two MIP renderings from opposite viewpoints show symmetrical images.

To start the MIP Renderer, right-click on an image's thumbnail (middle-click on the Mac) to open the contextual menu, then select 'Show in MIP renderer'.

Select your viewpoint by moving the 'Tilt' and 'Twist' sliders, or by dragging the mouse pointer on the large view (that will be empty at first, before your first rendering). Also try changing the zoom. You will see how the preview thumbnail changes. When you have set all the rendering options, click Render to create the final view, that you can save as a Tiff image.

You will find different rendering options on the window, and also in the Options menu. The configurable parameters are the rendering size and quality, the appereance of the bounding box, and the mode of the different Soft Thresholds applied to the image channels.

Rendering a movie

The Huygens Movie Maker allows you to easily create sophisticated animations of your multi-channel 3D images using the Fast Mip Renderer and the other powerful Huygens Visualization renderers.

Without the Movie Maker the MIP Renderer has the option to make simple animations of your image, changing the view point in different frames. Select the viewpoint coordinates for the first frame, then click Set > Home. Select now the viewpoint coordinates for the last frame, and click Set > End. (You can now go to the last or the first frame by clicking Go > End or Go> Home). Select all the rendering parameters, including the total number of rendered frames for the movie (Options > Animation frame count). Finally, click Animate, and select a directory to save the final AVI movie or the TIFF frames to.


Saving the independent TIFF movie frames is useful to combine multiple animations or for especial purposes. You can later load and edit these TIFF images with your favorite animation tool to create more complex movies. For instance, you can use the 'convert' tool from ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org) to make a GIF animation, using

convert -delay 20 animatedMip*.tiff animatedMip.gif

You can now place this single file GIF animation directly on your web page, as most of the internet browsers currently avaliable can handle this kind of movie files:



See another small animation sample: FastMip200.gif (845 kB 2008-09-15 14:53)

If your image is a time series, you can also make an animation along time frames.

See Make Animations for more details.

(Image above: isolated Rat Hepatocyte couplet recorded by Dr. Permsin Marbet at the Department of Anatomy, University of Basel, Switzerland, in the lab of Prof. Lukas Landmann)

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