When we view an swc file using the transparent mode in the 3D viewer, each tracing point is rendered as a ball, and the balls are connected by frustums. I believe this is the way Vaa3D renders skeletons and is hard-coded. Is there a way to not visualize the balls, and just show the neurons as a series of connected (and transparent) frustums?  Does anybody have a trick to avoid the ball rendering? 

Often people who are not too familiar with SWC files or Vaa3d get confused by the Ball rendering, and think that the balls represent some kind of concentrated protein expression or some other biological property.

Please let me know if there is a trick to avoid it. Thanks in advance.

Sumit

Then you can display the swc in the skeleton mode, and you can also press alt-L key to increase the width of the skeleton and change the node size.

Thanks Hanchuan. Is there a way to show real radius values as line-width for each line in the skeleton mode? Unfortunately just increasing the line-width to a constant value in line-mode does not work for my neurons, where I have two layers of the skeletons with variable radius.

In the skeleton mode, every node and edge will have the same width, unless you set a (or many) neuron(s) to be display in the tube-mode while others are displayed in the like (skeleton)mode. You can go to the Object Manager to change such display setting for different neurons.

If you want to know the width of a node, move the cursor on top on the node and stop for 2 second, a tooltip will appear and display the info.

-Hanchuan


Originally posted by Sumit Nanda: