How to more easily get consistent legend bounds in a VisIt pseudocolor animation?

[jjramsey]

One annoyance I have with VisIt animations of pseudocolor visualizations is that by default, the min and max of the legend in a given animation frame is just the min and max for that frame alone, rather than the min and max across all of the frames.

It doesn't matter if I set the pseudocolor limits to "Use Original Data" or "Use Actual Data"; I see the same behavior regardless.

So far, I've worked around this by going through the animation frame-by-frame to find the min and max across all of the frames, and then manually fixing the pseudocolor limits to those values. However this is laborious, and it seems like there should at least be a somewhat smarter way of doing this?

Is there anything better than my crude manual approach?

The version of VisIt that I have on my work computer is 3.3.3.

[JustinPrivitera]

There isn't a way to a priori know the max and min across all the timesteps without loading the data for each timestep into memory. VisIt only loads the parts of the data it needs. You can write a script or macro to create a plot, iterate through the timesteps, and query the max and min at each step and then set the bounds of your plot appropriately. I can help with that if you'd like.

[biagas]

Here is some code you can cut-and-paste into a tab in VisIt's Controls->Command window
It performs some queries to retrieve the min and max over all timesteps, then uses those values to set up the Pseudocolor plot.
It finally removes the 'Min/Max' text from the legend (as that will always change with time).
This assumes you want to set min/max based on currently plotted variable, and that the Pseudocolor plot is the first one in the list and active in Window 1.

Once you paste in the the Command window, you can then Execute. Or Make macro. Macros once created will be available for you next time you run VisIt, in the Controls->Macros window.

# perform some queries to get the min/max over all timesteps.
SetActiveWindow(1)
SetQueryOutputToValue()
QueryOverTime("Min")

SetActiveWindow(2)
min = Query("Min")
DeleteAllPlots()

SetActiveWindow(1)
QueryOverTime("Max")

SetActiveWindow(2)
max = Query("Max")
DeleteAllPlots()
DeleteWindow()

SetActiveWindow(1)

# set up the Pseudocolor plot to use the min/max from the above queries
pc = PseudocolorAttributes()
pc.minFlag = 1
pc.min = min
pc.maxFlag = 1
pc.max = max
SetPlotOptions(pc)

# turn off the min/max text in the Legend
plot0Legend = GetAnnotationObject(GetPlotList().GetPlots(0).plotName)
plot0Legend.drawMinMax=0