Glossary

Say what you mean. Mean what you say.

Actor

Represents an object (geometry and properties) in a rendered scene. See vtkActor.

Base Layer

A surface mesh that may be texture mapped, and lies beneath another mesh typically to fill holes in that mesh.

Cell

A cell is the geometry between points that defines the connectivity or topology of a mesh. See What is a Cell?

Connectivity

An array of offsets that index into an array of points to define how cells are constructed from those points.

Coordinate Reference System

A Coordinate Reference System defines how your geo-referenced spatial data relates to real locations on the Earth’s surface. Abbreviated to CRS.

Curvilinear Grid

For example, a qudrilateral-cell surface that can be created from an array of 2-D x and y spatial points.

Face

A polygonal cell in a mesh geometry. Also see Cell.

Land Mask

Typically a boolean array used to indicate the cells in a mesh that represent land.

Manifold

A water-tight, closed geometric structure e.g., a sphere.

Mesh

A spatially referenced dataset that may be a surface or volume in 3-D space. See What is a Mesh?

Node

Nodes are the vertices of a mesh. Also see Point.

Perceptually Uniform Colormap

A colormap in which equal steps in data are perceived as equal steps in the color space.

Point

Points are the vertices of the mesh, also referred to as the Cartesian coordinates of the underlying structure. See What is a Point?

Rectilinear Grid

For example, a quadrilateral-cell surface that can be created from an array of 1-D x and y spatial points.

Sea Mask

Typically a boolean array used to indicate the cells in a mesh that represent water e.g., river, lake, sea, ocean.

Texture Map

A graphical technique where a raster image is wrapped over the surface of a geometric object.

Threshold

To remove the cells from a mesh based on criteria of data associated with the mesh cells or points. See PyVista threshold.

Unstructured Mesh

A surface that is created from a geometry of points and a topology of indices that define how cells are constructed from those points. See Connectivity.

Warp

Extrude the points in a mesh by a proportional amount along the surface normals. See PyVista warp_by_scalar.