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Setting opacity in 3D renderings

This guide explains how to perform an optimal opacity setting according to the active rendering modality.

Making the biological structures transparent, digitally acquired inside their complex world, allows us to see through the objects in the foreground. The contribution of the voxels in front of you, referring to your point of view (camera view), is reduced compared to their real intensity value. The reduction of intensity is obtained by editing the opacity coefficient accordingly to our visualization needs.

This operation is defined as the single voxel's intensity values mapping vs. the opacity coefficient. However, this allows only a limited selection of the structures in the dataset, like specific structures or anatomical regions, since no spatial or specific information is considered. Since the structures do not just differ by intensity values, opacity is not suited for the selection or identification of objects in a dataset but only to improve visibility.

Basic concepts

The Opacity gradient curve is set graphically.

The intensity range is located on the abscissa axis while the Opacity percentage is represented on the ordinate axis.

All the voxels having an intensity value located inside the curve, give them a contribute proportionally to the Opacity percentage set. The rest of the voxels, located outside the curve, are not visualised.

Below you can see two examples of different levels of opacity on the green channel. High opacity level on the left, low opacity level on the right.

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