You have the ConnectomeViewer up and running. You downloaded a sample connectome file and opened it. Now, this tutorial demonstrates the basic steps to visualize the data.
1. You need to activate a network first. This loads the surfaces and volumes into memory. And the network layouting is calculated. When nothing else is specified, the nodes are positioned at the center of gravity of their corresponding surfaces patches. Double-click the network you want to activate. In the console, you should see debug messages when you started the ConnectomeViewer with the verbose (-v) option.
2. You should now see nodes placed in the 3D View. But without edges. Usually, it is messy to look at all the edges at once. So there are ways to select edges, but that’s for later. To show all the edges, you have to right-click on the network to open the context menu and select Select All Nodes and Edges. You should know see your complete rendered network including edges. (For our Mac users, right-clicking is substituted by pressing the Control key and clicking). Using the option Unselect All Nodes and Edges will turn off all the edges again.
3. There are a bunch of key bindings usable in the 3D View. To display them, click on the main menu Help -> Key Bindings. A HTML pages pops up in your browser, listing all the keys. We will focus on a few for the start. Here are the key-bindings:
| Show Node Information Dialog | I or i |
| De-/Select Node and add Edges (neighbor nodes not selected) | 1 |
| De-/Select Node and add Edges (neighbor nodes are selected) | 2 |
| Toggle the selection of a Node without adding Edges | T or t |
| Pick point and show coordinates | P or p |
| Activate Light Manager | L or l |
| Reset the camera perspective | R or r |
| Set Focal Point to current Position | f |
| Save Scene to Image | s or S |
| Red-Blue Stereo Mode Rendering | 3 |
| Rotate object | Arrows |
| Pan object | Shift - Arrows |
| Zoom In/Out | + / - |
| Toggle node labels | g or G |
| Pan the plot | Left mouse down and move |
| Zoom in an out | Mousewheel up and down |
| Zoom Box for Region | Press 'z' and select with mouse |
| Range Selection | Right-click and select range on colorbar |
| Save Text File / Python Script | Ctrl - S |
| Run Python Script | Ctrl - R |
4. First, unselect all nodes. In the 3D View, the nodes are shown as cubes (this can be changed in the Visualization Object Editor). The nodes can have two states: either selected or unselected. Selected nodes show a transparent yellow sphere around the cubes. To toggle the selection of nodes, you need to point your mouse cursor directly over the node you want to select in the 3D View. Now press the key t on your keyboard to change the selection. You need to take care to really place the cursor above the node, you can zoom and drag the network for this.
5. Similarily, if you press the key i when over a node with the mouse cursor, an information box pops up with information about this particular node. If the nodes have an attribute dn_label, you can toggle the label by pressing the key g.
6. Similarily, you can press the key 1 when over a node to display all adjacent edges for undirected graphs. The neighboring nodes are thereby not selected. Pressing key 1 again unselects them again. For the same functionality but to select the neighboring nodes automatically, use key 2. This might become later useful when you have a very dense graph which you want to explore. Selected nodes can be used then to define a subgraph. This subgraph might then be used for further analysis.
7. You can also selectively show surfaces patches. Namely for selected nodes. Right-click on the activated network in the Connectome File View and select Toggle Surface Visibility.
8. In the 3D View, you can rotate (left mouse button), zoom (right mouse button), or pan (middle mouse button). Using Shift Key and the left mouse button, you can change the position of the camera. With the key r, you reset the camera.
9. For thresholding, right-click on the network and select Edge Parameters to find the dialog with multiple thresholding options.